


Little Box

by bluepeony



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types, The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-07
Updated: 2015-02-23
Packaged: 2017-12-10 17:34:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 36,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/788317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluepeony/pseuds/bluepeony
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Modern AU: Kili doesn't remember Dís. He was young when he was taken away from her to go and live with Uncle Thorin. He barely even remembers his brother Fili. But a phone call out of the blue means now Fili's coming to live with them, as though the flat above Bilbo Baggins' flower shop isn't already crowded enough.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_"I don't believe the accident of birth makes people sisters or brothers. It makes them siblings. Gives them mutuality of parentage. Sisterhood and brotherhood is a condition people have to work at."_

\- Maya Angelou

 

The boating lake at Buckland Park is frozen. All the green and the blue has silvered, and the dome of the band stand glitters like the round crystals in Thorin's shop. It's quiet, and it's still, but the evergreen shrubs and hawthorn glow intensely against the grey light. Kili likes the world like this, patient and sleeping. The easy peace of winter.

He hoists his bag up, wipes at a nose stiff with blood and old scabs, and peers into the lake. Nothing there. It's like a steamed-up mirror, his reflection gleamed and frozen. It's easy to convince himself there really is no one else around - no one in the world - and it feels good. It's difficult to tell what time it is. It goes dark so early now, and his watch was stolen months ago. Thorin won't give him a new one, even though he can get them for free. Says Kili will only lose it. Says he can't be trusted with the smallest thing, even when it's clasped to his bloody wrist.

Even so, school finished ages ago and it's definitely late enough for him to be in trouble now. Thorin usually allows himself half an hour to be worried, and then it's fury from there on out. Kili can't find it in himself to care much. People at school say far worse things than his fretting uncle, and besides, Thorin's been in a bad mood for weeks now. Ever since he got that strange phone call last month, the one Kili wasn't supposed to listen in on but did, accidentally, on his way to fetch a glass of water.

Thorin's mood only worsened when, last week, two people in neat blazers drew up in a van and came up to the flat, poked and prodded at all of their stuff, even went into Kili's room and looked in his wardrobe and under his bed without asking first. They asked Thorin all sorts of weird questions, what kind of stuff he made for dinner and what he cleaned the kitchen surfaces with and whether or not he tested the fire alarm once a fortnight. They'd even interrogated poor Mr Baggins in the shop below.

Kili runs into Mr Baggins on his way home. This isn't a surprise. The stairs to the flat are at the back of Mr Baggins' flower shop, Bag End, and he always always _always_ catches Kili trying to sneak in without being seen. He storms out of his bedsit, already in his patchwork dressing gown and slippers, bustling purple tulips as he goes.

“For heaven's sake, Kili, where have you _been_?”

“Just at the park.”

“The pa – ? Why on earth were you at the park at this time? In this weather? When it's this dark? Your uncle's been down three times to ask if I've seen you and I've...” Mr Baggins stops dead when Kili shifts forward out of the shades cast by the winter gloom and the flowers. “My God, Kili, what's happened to your face?”

“Nothing!” Kili ducks beneath the outstretched arm in front of him, but Mr Baggins is quick. He pulls Kili back by his school bag, eyes bright with sudden concern.

“You've blood all over your nose!” he says, sounding only a little repulsed. “What's happened, then? Have you, ah... have you been in a... scuffle?”

Kili resists the urge to roll his eyes. “I'm _fine_ , Mr Baggins. Can I go upstairs to wash it off?”

Mr Baggins steps hesitantly aside to let Kili pass. “Be sure to tell your uncle, won't you?” he says.

The flat on Shire's End is quite small, but it's only Kili and Thorin living in it so it doesn't matter much. There's a long carpeted staircase - thick, red patterned carpet, like a pub floor - and a tiny hallway with two bedrooms on the left and the kitchen and lounge on the right. It's not luxurious, but they've tried their best to make it homely. Two summers ago they painted the lounge a deep honey yellow and laid big rugs over the bare floorboards, and Mr Baggins helped hang a little string garden from the kitchen ceiling with bright green ferns and orange begonias. They covered pockmarks and scars on the walls with photographs. There's a framed picture of Kili above the fireplace, clutching a drooping ice cream at Filey Bay Beach on his seventh birthday, his hair sticking to it in the wind.

But it's the size of the flat, the terribly close proximity of tiny rooms, which makes it difficult to do anything even remotely private or stealthy, such as sneaking in unnoticed. As soon as Kili makes it to the top of the stairs he hears a deep voice summoning him into the lounge.

Thorin's sitting in the armchair opposite the gas fire, the coffee table smattered with notepads and long rolls of receipts and two different kinds of calculator. He has a pen tucked behind his ear and his sleeves rolled to his elbows. For as long as Kili can remember, the flat has been positively stuffed with receipts. When he was little Thorin used to give him the older receipts to draw on, to stop him using his crayons on the walls.

“What have you been doing?” Thorin asks without turning around. His voice is gruff and tired, like he's about to fall into bed. “Where have you been?”

“Sorry, I lost track of time.”

“But where have you _been_?”

“Buckland Park.”

“For hell's sake, Kili, the lake's been frozen over for weeks. What were you doing there?”

Kili shrugs and chips at the door frame, even though he can't be seen. He's used to getting told off by his uncle. They're not even proper lectures anymore, just terse conversations with lots of sighing and tutting. Thorin sighs now, in fact, and turns to look at him. When he sees Kili's face he shakes his head. Not like he's sad. Just tired.

Thorin's always tired these days. Well, he was always tired before too, but in a different way. He owns a jewellery shop in town, Arkenstone, and he used to adore it. There was a time, years ago, when he'd come home from the shop utterly exhausted, but a _good_ kind of exhausted. He'd be red-faced and smiling from a busy day spent on his feet, serving customers, stocking his shelves with beautiful jewellery. He'd drop on to the couch and pull Kili on to his lap and yawn, "Shall we have a nap before dinner?" and within minutes he'd be snoring. Kili, too restless for sleep at the best of times, would sit there happily in his arms, watching the television on low.

They don't have a television anymore. They had to sell it, along with everything else of worth in the flat, once the shop began to dwindle into a sorry state last year. Recessions and insufficient capital and over-investment and other phrases Kili didn't fully understand were for months the topics of hushed, world-weary conversations between Thorin and his business partner Dwalin. Thorin doesn't come home smiling and blissfully red in the face anymore, but he certainly comes home tired.

Now he stands and walks over, raising an arm. For one strange moment Kili thinks Thorin is going to hug him, but instead he takes Kili by the shoulder and leads him into the bathroom. He fetches a clean wash cloth from under the sink and wets it.

“Lean over the sink,” he gently orders, and starts dabbing at Kili's blood-choked nose. He isn't rough, but it hurts, and Kili wants to tell him he can do it himself. Thorin always does it for him. It's almost ritualistic, even though Kili is nearly fifteen years old now. “You're going to start taking the bus home,” says Thorin, rinsing the flannel and raising it to Kili's face again.

“But you always say the fare's ridiculous!”

“I mean the school bus.”

“No!” Kili jerks his head to look at his uncle and ends up getting the wash cloth in his eye. “No, they're worse on the bus.”

“Keep out of their way, then.”

“I can't!”

“Then I'll ask Dwalin to start picking you up. And you can walk back with Mr Baggins on his way home from the market on Wednesdays. I'm not having you –”

“But –”

“I'm _not_ having you staying out in the dead of winter on your own. Do you not think I have enough on my plate without having to worry myself sick wondering where you are? I've got the shop to run, your... your brother's arriving tomorrow, we'll have social workers poking round the flat for God knows how long. I don't need this, Kili.” He slaps the cloth into the sink, smattering dark bits of blood, and turns the tap on to wash it away. “Next week I want you home _on time_ every day. Having someone else live with us... you're just going to have to start pulling your weight a bit more.”

“I'm sorry,” Kili mumbles, upper lip dripping with pink water. “I just wanted to be on my own for a bit.”

“You can be alone in your bedroom. That's what it's there for, your space.” Thorin looks at him, and his expression softens very slightly. “Look, I know you're having a hard time but it won't be forever. Another year at most. Can you manage a year for me?” He hesitates. “Do you want me to come in and speak to your teachers?”

“No!”

“Because I can, you know...”

“I don't want you to.”

It would only make things worse. Thorin would be so uncomfortable sitting there, trying yet again to explain why his nephew can't seem to get along with a single other person in his class, why nobody seems to like him. Kili's always felt that Thorin's a bit embarrassed by it all. He was popular at school. He's got old photographs in his desk drawer of himself as a stocky, smirking teenager, sitting in a row with his rugby mates, the ball in his lap to show his status as Captain. Kili's useless at most sports. He's too short to be any good at running, though Thorin insists he'd be the perfect build for rugby if only he'd eat a little more.

Of course, Thorin would never _say_ that he's disappointed in Kili; that he wishes he could just be a bit more, well, _normal_. He would be more than willing to go to Kili's school and have a word with the teachers and try to fix things for him, but Kili doesn't want him to. People would give him an even harder time for being sad enough to go sobbing to his uncle and to staff. Besides, Thorin would be so disappointed if the teachers showed him the clutch of pink detention slips which say that, even if Kili doesn't start fights, he's certainly quick to fight _back_.

Thorin finishes rinsing the wash cloth and wrings it, tossing it into the laundry basket by the bath. “Alright then,” he sighs, “off you go to your room now. And keep the noise to a minimum, please, I've a few things to sort out. I'll give you a shout when tea's ready.”

 

 

Kili's room has always been small. With the new single bed crammed in beneath the window, there's even less space to move around. Actually, the bed's not new at all. It's second hand. They found it at a car boot sale for £15, and Mr Baggins gave them a spare mattress he said he had in storage. It smells very good though, very clean and fresh, and Kili suspects it isn't a spare mattress at all. He suspects Mr Baggins bought the mattress specially for them.

There's not much else in the bedroom, just a wardrobe and an old chest of drawers and a cage for his budgie, Blue. The walls are a dull cream they never got around to painting, but Kili's done his best to cover them with pictures and drawings and postcards. He's got a _lot_ of postcards now, picked up from the day trips Mr Baggins used to take him on when he was younger: Bempton Cliffs and Lancaster Castle, The Forbidden Corner, the Pendle Witches Treasure Trail, Carlisle Cathedral and Hadrian's Wall. They don't have many days out anymore. Not because of money; the trips would barely cost anything bar the price of a quick train journey and twenty pence for the postcard. Mr Baggins just doesn't have the time anymore. Kili wishes he did. There's still a patch of wall he needs to fill.

He feeds Blue a few seeds before flopping on to his own bed, curling up into a ball even though his feet don't even come close to the end of the mattress. He's been short his whole life, and it looks like it's going to stay that way. At any rate, he hasn't had that magical teenage boy growth spurt yet. It has its advantages and disadvantages, his height; on one hand, he's spectacular at hiding – on the other, he's not nearly as fast a runner as he'd like to be.

He wonders if his brother is tall, or short like him. Kili has one photograph of them together, in the small wooden box stashed at the bottom of his wardrobe. It's not much good, though. Kili is three in the photo, which would make his brother, Fili, around four or five. They have the same round baby faces, the same ill-fitting jumble sale clothes. The only difference is Fili is blond, whereas Kili's hair has always been wild and raggedy, almost black. Like a scruffy water spaniel, Thorin says, when he's in a good mood.

His mood hasn't brightened at all by tea time. They eat in silence, save for the moment Thorin tells Kili not to lick his knife. Afterwards, when they're washing up, he passes a plate to Kili and says, “Have you cleaned your room?”

“Did it last night.”

“And you've cleared a space in the wardrobe?”

“Yeah. And a drawer, too.”

It wasn't an easy task. There was a lot of stuff in that drawer. Most of it was old or dusty or broken, and ended up in the bin. Thorin's always on at him to clear out his room, but now Kili's actually done it he just grunts. He's got huge purple bags under his eyes; he looks _exhausted_ , like he wants nothing more than to go straight to bed after cleaning up, rather than stay up half the night playing with squiggly numbers.

“It won't be forever, you know,” he says after a while, drying his hands. “Sharing a room, I mean. If he stays... we'll just have to find somewhere bigger.”

Kili nods, even though he knows they can't _afford_ anywhere bigger.

“Maybe sell the shop,” Thorin continues tentatively.

Kili looks up at that, startled. “But you love the shop!”

Thorin shrugs, as though loving something hardly justifies keeping it. “It might not come to that. You never know, you might get on famously with Fili. You might really enjoy sharing a bedroom, having a brother, a bit of company. It might be good for us.” He gives a tired smile and reaches to ruffle Kili's hair. “Do you remember your brother at all?”

Kili's been asked this question before, by the social workers who've been in and out of their flat all month, who last week sat him down in the living room with a cup of tea and a thick paper book with his brother's name and picture on the front. They asked if he remembered much, and he gave them all the same answer: "Bits and pieces."

It's what he says to Thorin now. He can't say he remembers his brother _well_ , that sharing the flat with him will be like welcoming someone familiar home. But there will always be memories stuck sepia-tinted in his mind. Words and voices and faces, images and short fuzzy sequences like old film reels. Bits and pieces.


	2. Chapter 2

Kili wakes early on Saturday morning and lies very still, watching the orange winter sun rise through the curtains and begin nibbling gently on the windowsill. He isn't used to waking this early. Usually he wakes up too late and has to bolt out of bed and run to breakfast half-dressed. Mr Baggins says his body clock is all skew-whiff from staying up too late. Says he can hear the thud of Kili's night-time footsteps from his bedsit directly below.

Normally, Kili loves the weekends. He used to take his bow into the garden and practice archery using old cracked flower pots from Bag End, but last summer Mr Baggins went to the council and divided up the land and sold all the grassy bits off to someone else, and now they just have a little courtyard with no sunlight or lawn at all. Kili's bow and arrows lean against the chest of drawers in his bedroom, covered in grey dust.

There are others things he can do, though; reading and drawing and listening to the radio, as long as he's careful not to knock it out of tune. Sometimes Thorin goes to Arkenstone and leaves Kili on his own for a few hours. Kili doesn't mind. He helps Mr Baggins out in the flower shop or makes tiny windup animals in Thorin's chair in the lounge or goes to the park. It's alright being on his own. He likes the quiet.

But this weekend, Thorin is definitely staying in. At eight o'clock he knocks on Kili's door and tells him to get up and dressed. Kili pulls a face at the door, but does as he's told. He slouches across his bedroom and feeds Blue first, giving his head a quick pet. Then he opens up his wardrobe, closes it again, opens a drawer, closes it again, goes back to the wardrobe. All his clothes are a bit rubbish. They're cast-offs, mainly. Jumble sale couture.

The only thing that fits him properly is his school uniform, and he can't exactly wear that. He only has one thing he likes. A dark red jumper, the one Thorin says makes him look like an orphan. It falls way past his wrists and half-way down his thighs, but he doesn't really mind. He finds his only pair of jeans that aren't ripped at the knees and goes into the bathroom to wash his face, and when he goes into the kitchen Thorin's sitting at the table with the morning's newspaper in front of him.

His eyes aren't moving on the page. Kili doesn't know why Thorin bothers pretending he isn't nervous. He does weird stuff whenever the landlord's due round, too. He'll start cleaning things that are already clean and reorganizing the books and mugs and kitchen towels, and saying, “For goodness' sake, I'm _fine_ ,” whenever Kili asks what's wrong.

Thorin worries about _everything_.

“I haven't been to the supermarket yet,” he sighs behind his paper. “I thought we could all go together later on. You'll just have to have what's in the cupboards for now.”

Kili wants to argue, because all that's in the cupboards is dry pasta and half a loaf of slightly stale Warburtons. But Thorin doesn't look to be in the mood for arguing. Even when Kili offers to nip to the corner shop for him, Thorin just grunts at him to sit down. Sometimes Kili wishes his uncle could just be normal and get married like everyone else. Then they'd never run out of food or have to wear rubbish clothes.

After breakfast, they sit quietly in the lounge. Kili perches on the windowsill, perking up anxiously every time a person or car approaches on the street outside. But each time he just sees his brother morph into milkmen and newspaper boys and people walking dogs. The minutes go tick tick tick on the mantel piece clock; by ten o'clock, Thorin is up and restless and has begun busying himself with watering the bird's nest fern Mr Baggins brought round at Christmas. It's a huge spiky thing. Kili liked it at first because he thought it was actually meant for birds to nest in, but when he put Blue inside it he just chewed up four of the leaves and left a mess on the kitchen floor and flew off. Thorin wasn't particularly happy about it.

Kili turns back to the road outside. In the distance he spots a grey dot drawing closer and closer, until he can see a smiling sunshine painted on the side of a silver van. The engine stops right outside the flower shop. That's when Kili knows it's his brother in the car. He jumps back from the window, suddenly shy. Thorin looks at him.

“Stay here,” he says firmly. “Don't go wandering off.”

“I wasn't going to!”

Thorin doesn't hear him. He's already out of the room, thumping down the stairs. Kili sits on the couch and waits. He pokes his fingers out from the long sleeves of his jumper to rub his thumb gently along the frayed hem. It's soft now from him doing it so often. This is the only item of clothing he has that he loves. His mum sent it in the post on his thirteenth birthday, and Thorin went spare when he saw it. He said she had absolutely no business sending presents out of the blue. He said Kili was stupid to open it without checking with Thorin first because it might have been something _dangerous_. Kili still isn't sure what sort of things he was thinking of. Knives, perhaps? Poison? At any rate, Thorin still insisted on chucking the jumper in the laundry straight away. He said it stank of stale smoke. _“Typical. Unwashed and a yard too big. How the hell old does she think you are? Twenty-five?”_

Kili can hear him now, the wind chimes by the front door tinkling. He sounds flustered but it's difficult to make out what he's saying. Then a woman speaks, bright and shrill, and the door to the flat opens and lots of footsteps start creaking along the stairs. Kili sits up straight, heart suddenly thumping. It might even burst right through his red jumper. He puts his hands over it just in case.

Thorin comes in first. He gives Kili a little smile, before a woman follows him in. It's the lady who poked round the flat two weeks ago. Her name is Lorna. She said so last time she was here. She's very small and blonde with rows and rows of white shark teeth, and she's smiling at him as she says, “Hello, Kili. Come and meet your brother, sweetheart,” as though Kili hasn't met him before.

Fili is short too. He has a ragged denim shirt and torn black jeans and scruffy boots, and the only thing that isn't untidy about him is his hair, which is blond and shiny and so long he has it up in a ponytail. There are little plastic bits twisted into tiny braids at the front, like the pastina they sometimes have for dinner. He has stubble on his face and studs in his ears.

Kili doesn't move.

“Say hello, Kili,” says Thorin.

“Hello,” he mumbles.

“Look at you two boys,” says Lorna. “You look just like each other!”

Kili looks at Fili. They don't look alike at all. From the expression on Fili's face, it's clear he's thinking the same thing.

“Fili? Don't you have anything you'd like to say to your brother?”

Fili looks from Lorna, to Kili, to the window across the room. Lorna's red smile widens, like she's straining to keep it on her face. She mouths “tired” at Thorin.

“Now listen, boys,” she says, “I have some papers to run through with your uncle...”

Thorin looks at her. “Papers?”

“Your assessment report? It's been presented to the fostering panel since our last visit, now we just need to check you're happy with it. It's a standard procedure for emergency carers –”

“Look, can we... I'm sure the boys don't want to hear about all this, do you? Kili, why don't you show Fili where he's going to be staying?”

“That's a brilliant idea!” says Lorna. “It's a lovely room, isn't it?”

Kili stares at her. Does she think he's six or something? That she's rescued his brother from the clutches of a witch? He looks at Fili, hoping to maybe catch his eye and grin to show they're on the same side. But Fili is gazing boredly across the room, blue eyes fixed on the over-watered bird's nest fern.

Thorin clears his throat, giving Kili a little pat on the back. “Off you go, then.”

So they go.

Kili isn't sure whether to call Fili a new brother or an old one, but either way, his bedroom suddenly seems much shabbier with Fili standing in it. He's strangely glamorous, with his long hair and wooden bracelets and hulking, badge-crammed backpack. For the first time in years Kili's acutely aware of the peeling yellow wallpaper and scattered clockwork animals, most of them half-finished, the haphazard drawings stuck to the walls like babyish keepsakes. Fili almost trips on the hem of the rug when he walks in, tutting as though it's Kili's fault. He dumps his shoulder bag on the first bed he sees.

“That's mine,” Kili blurts out, and Fili spins around. “I mean... sorry, but that bed's mine. Yours is over there.”

“By the window? You don't even have any proper curtains.” Fili sighs and picks up his bag again. “Shove out the way then, let me pass.”

Instead of waiting for Kili to move, Fili shoulders past him and flops heavily on to his own bed, the springs creaking loudly in protest. Kili folds his arms across his chest, glaring. Yes, the bedroom is small, and the curtains are flimsy and don't do much to keep the light out, but it's hardly something to complain about. It's not like Thorin _has_ to let Fili stay here.

Kili perches carefully on the edge of his own bed. There's a rustle of sheets, and when Kili looks up Fili has turned on to his side and buried his head in a blanket, his ponytail sticking out the back.

“There's more blankets on the top shelf of the wardrobe,” Kili says limply.

“Brilliant. Wonderful.”

And then there doesn't seem to be much to say. Kili looks at his brother for a long time. His brother. _Brother_. He whispers the word to himself, and it sounds strange on his tongue. It's always been just him, for so long. Ever since he was tiny. Now it's like he's been split in two, and one half of himself is wrapped up in blankets across the room, away from him.

“Do you want me to show you where you can put your stuff?” he asks after a while. No answer. “There's half the wardrobe and a drawer, but you can have more space if you like. I don't mind. I don't have much.”

Nothing. Kili kicks his feet back against the wooden legs of his bed, waiting.

“Our flat's really small,” he says. “There isn't a garden anymore either, but there's a great park not far away. I could show you if you want. It's alright, living here. Uncle said you lived in London. Before you came here, I mean. Is it... nice there?”

Perhaps Fili has fallen asleep. Kili slides off the bed, waits a moment to give him another chance, then quietly slips out of the room. He wants to go and sit with Thorin instead; maybe he can help with the papers and stuff too. But in the middle of the hallway he hears the social worker's voice, and he freezes, quiet as a mouse.

“If you're approved to become a long-term carer, we'll continue to support and guide –”

“Long-term?” That's Thorin. His voice is so low Kili has to strain to hear it. “I never said anything about long-term.”

“But if that's the situation which ultimately arises –”

“How can it? I can hardly afford the extra mouth to feed as it is. God, I really do think I'm the wrong person for this –”

“You're entirely the right person. Other than your sister, you're Fili's last known living relative. Your standard checks, assessment report, everything is fine, and financial support will be provided. You have nothing to worry about.”

“On paper, perhaps. What if he...” Thorin trails off. “I don't want Kili to feel like he's being pushed out. He has a hard enough time at school as it is, and I can't... what if they don't get on?”

And Lorna says, in this silly, simpering voice, a _professional_ voice, “We appreciate that the time they've spent apart has resulted in the need for them to... _get to know_ each other again. But they're brothers. This is a very wonderful opportunity...”

Kili backs away across the hall and into his room again. He doesn't want to hear any more. He shouldn't be listening in anyway, and Thorin would have had a fit if he'd seen him. He always used to say the one thing he couldn't stand most in the world was a sneak. Kili suspects very much there are things Thorin hates a lot more than sneaks, but it was always a pretty effective line when Kili was little and Thorin wanted to make him feel really bad about eavesdropping.

Back in the bedroom Fili is lying in the same position as before: head tucked under the blankets, legs sprawled out on the mattress. His shoes are still on. Kili waits a moment, watching him.

“I hate you,” he mutters after a while, and it isn't true, perhaps, but he wants Fili to react.

He doesn't at all.


	3. Chapter 3

Fili won't come to the supermarket so Thorin presses a couple of pound notes into Kili's hand and tells him to run to the corner shop up the road. It's freezing outside, already dark and icy now the sun's gone down, and he can see his white breath in the air as he walks. He hopes Bifur won't be behind the counter. Bifur's slow and a bit scary, and he fought in the Falklands War and something happened to his brain so now he can't speak properly. Thorin says they're not allowed to laugh, but Kili never really wants to anyway. It's just sort of sad.

Luckily, it's Bofur behind the counter when Kili gets there, and he isn't scary at all. He's Bifur's cousin and he's lovely, and Kili's known him since he was a little kid. The shop's only ever really busy in the mornings and at lunchtimes, so Bofur makes little toys while he mans the counter, tiny wind-up things, tin mice and wooden ponies, like you see in proper toy shops in cities. He never huffs at Kili for dawdling, and he nearly always slips him a toy or some seeds for Blue or a bag of penny sweets, even though Kili's a bit too old for that sort of thing now.

Bofur is winding up a clockwork mouse when Kili goes into the shop. It's a little blue one, and when he lets it go it darts off round the counter, whirring in circles, its plastic whiskers twitching.

“Hello, my lad,” Bofur smiles.

“Hi!” says Kili. “Cool mouse.”

“Clockwork hamster, actually.” Bofur picks up the toy and shrugs. “I'm afraid I can't get his tail to stay on. Think the cold's doing funny things to my fingers. Ah well.” He sets the mouse aside. “What you after then? Something sweet?”

“Just dinner,” says Kili. He takes down a tin of ravioli and a loaf of bread from the back, a bag of apples from the fruit basket and a pint of milk from the fridge. Whenever they do a big shop he sees ladies pushing huge trolleys brimming with a thousand different items and at least two babies, but Thorin's never been much cop at that sort of thing. When Kili was little, Thorin used to give Mr Baggins a weekly sum and have him take Kili to the supermarket instead, because Kili was the kind of kid who threw a lot of tantrums and tried to nick things off the shelves. Now they mostly live off tinned stuff and bread from Bofur's shop.

“Is your brother here yet?” asks Bofur, ringing up the items.

Bofur isn't supposed to know about Fili. Thorin always says their business is their business and no one else's, but Kili sort of forgot and let it slip last week when he was buying chewing gum on his way home from school.

“He arrived today. This morning.” Kili pauses. “He's really quiet. And he doesn't look anything like me.”

“Well,” says Bofur, leaning conspiratorially across the counter, “I _often_ think it's a blessing we're not all exact copies of our brothers and sisters, don't you?”

Kili laughs. Bofur's brother Bombur is _incredibly_ fat with all this wild red hair, like the Picts they learn about in history. He's the exact opposite of Bofur. He's so huge he has to have some of his clothes made specially at a tailor's up in Hull.

“As for your brother being quiet,” Bofur continues, putting the food in a carrier bag, “I expect that's just nerves. Well, anybody'd be shy! He'll perk up in a day or two, Kili, you'll see. Bring him in when he does, I can't wait to meet another Durin. I'm sure the pair of you will be driving your uncle bloody barmy in no time.” He passes Kili the bag, then slides the toy mouse across the counter. “Here you go. See if you can find him a tail.”

 

 

When Kili gets home he puts the mouse in his wooden box in the wardrobe and goes back into the kitchen. Fili won't sit down to have tea with them, so Thorin makes him a plate up and leaves it on the counter.

“I can take it through to him,” Kili offers, but Thorin shakes his head, chewing heavily. They listen to the radio, a BBC play about a couple getting divorced, and by the time they're done Fili still hasn't come out of the bedroom.

“Can I have his?” asks Kili. He's _always_ starving hungry. He can eat any time. Thorin says it's because he fidgets so much.

“No, you've had yours. Run and put the kettle on, then come and sit back down in here.”

Kili grumbles about it but does as he's told. He doesn't think that's very fair. Thorin always goes on about not wasting food, but Fili's toast's gone cold and soggy with ravioli sauce now so nobody can eat it.

“What have you two been talking about then?” Thorin asks once Kili's sitting back down.

“Not much.”

“No?”

“He sort of fell asleep.”

“Oh.” Thorin nods, looking grim. “For the whole afternoon?”

Kili fidgets, then shrugs.

“He'll eat with us tomorrow,” Thorin says, without much conviction. “He just needs time to settle in.”

“I don't know what to say to him,” Kili blurts out, but in a low voice, in case Fili can hear them. “It's really awkward. Can't I sleep in the front room tonight? I could just...”

He trails off as his uncle gives him this long, stern look. There was a time when Thorin would humour almost anything Kili came out with, but now it seems he's trying to get the message across that Kili is nearly fifteen, not a little kid anymore, and he should know what's appropriate to say and what isn't.

Apparently this isn't. Thorin doesn't give him an answer, but his silence is enough of an indication that Kili is to sleep in his own bed tonight, and he's to try harder with his brother who doesn't feel like a brother at all, but a stubborn house guest here on a long, uncertain holiday.

Fili really is asleep when Kili gets into bed that night, but at one point, just after midnight, Kili hears him slip out of bed and pad across the hall and flick the light in the kitchen. He must be so hungry he's eating his dinner after all, even though it went cold hours ago.

 

 

Sunday is a blur Kili spends in Bag End. He helps  trowel soil into terracotta pots, getting it all over his face so that Mr Baggins has to send him to wash before going back up to the flat. Fili doesn't pretend to sleep today, but he sits cross-legged on his bed in frayed sweat pants and a t-shirt emblazoned with a band Kili's never heard of. His hair's loose and he has this tatty book in his lap which he scribbles in. When Kili's sent to ask if he's coming for lunch and again for dinner, Fili ignores him, though he seems to drag his pen down against the page a bit harder whenever Kili's in the room.

It's not fair. This is Kili's bedroom. It's been his bedroom since he was tiny, and now it's like he's being pushed out and Fili hasn't even said a word. All Kili's own things suddenly seem like shabby intrusions around Fili's glamorous corner den of cool clothes and well-thumbed journals and the exotic-looking blanket he's draped over his bed. He hasn't unpacked anything else, though. It's like he thinks he isn't staying long.

Monday isn't nearly so quiet. Oh, it starts off peacefully enough and then, just before seven, Kili wakes to the sound of hard rain on the window and tapping across the room, soft twittering and fluttering. When he looks over, Blue is pecking to be let out.

“It's too early to be up,” Kili whispers, “go back to sleep.”

Blue cocks his head to the side, like he's confused. At any rate, he won't go back to sleep. Anxious that Fili might wake up, Kili slips out of bed and opens up Blue's cage, lifts his budgie out and puts him on his bed. They play for a while, Kili shifting his hand from side to side against the mattress so Blue can chase it, tail bobbing happily. Then, when he's tired out, Kili picks him up and puts him in his hand and Blue goes pliant, letting himself be petted.

He is Kili's first and only pet, and he's nearly four now. That's old in budgie terms, but he's really tame, not ratty at all. He loves being held too, and as soon as Kili gently pets his head Blue starts crooning and twittering. The lump in the bed across the room suddenly shifts.

“Can't you shut that thing up?” Fili huffs, voice sleep-rough and thick. It's the first thing he's said to Kili since Saturday morning.

“Sorry,” says Kili, even though he's not.

He doesn't bother explaining that Blue would only make more noise in his cage. He gets out of bed and goes into the kitchen, feeds Blue a few sunflower seeds out of the packet on the windowsill, then hoists himself up on to the counter to watch the rain. Thorin comes in half an hour later, already dressed for work. He shakes his head at Kili and tells him to get a move on or he'll be late for school.

It's when Kili's in his uniform making breakfast, Blue back in his cage, that the noise starts.

“I'm not going,” he hears Fili tell Thorin.

“Fili,” says Thorin, “it's already been arranged –”

“Well you can _un_ arrange it! I'm not going and you can't bloody make me!”

Actually, Fili's language is a bit more colourful than 'bloody', and Kili feels a flush spread up his cheekbones till the tips of his ears burn red. Not because he hasn't heard, or even used, words like that before. No, the burn is more from fear; Thorin hates when Kili swears, though he does it plenty himself. He also hates being interrupted, and he hates being talked back to. Fili's going to get himself into a lot of trouble.

But weirdly, Thorin doesn't shout. In fact, his voice is so low and calm that Kili can't hear the words properly, and two minutes later the bedroom door opens and Thorin comes out, Fili trudging in tow. Moments later, they're somehow having breakfast together.

Fili doesn't eat much but he nibbles dutifully on a slice of toast, and he doesn't have a proper uniform but he's wearing a denim shirt with buttons and he doesn't look _too_ scruffy, and when Thorin sends them both off Kili can almost kid himself that this is all normal, that they really are just two normal brothers on their way to school together.

They make it as far as the start of the street their school sits on before Fili stops right there, hands jammed in his pockets. It's still raining and his blond hair has turned almost brown with water.

“The school's down here,” says Kili, pointing. “See, you can't miss it, it looks like a prison.”

“I know where it is, I'm not stupid. And it _is_ a prison.” Fili motions to the right with his head, off down a winding side street. “I'm going this way. And don't bother telling your uncle.”

“He's your uncle too.” Kili wavers, torn, his fingers clenching and unclenching on the strap of his bag. “You'll get him into trouble if you don't go.” _You'll get_ me _into trouble, too_.

“It's not a big deal, alright? Look, there's no point me starting here at this place, I'm not going to be here long. And he'll only worry if you tell him. You don't want him to worry, do you?”

Kili shakes his head, feeling stupid.

“Right. So keep it buttoned up, yeah?” says Fili, like Kili's a five-year-old.

It's fitting, really. He _feels_ that young, just standing there, watching his brother cross the road and disappear off down the side street. 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for bullying and OCs. I didn't really know how - or, I guess, want - to write this without OCs, so I apologise if that isn't really your thing. They won't be major characters.

Kili hates school. He's always hated school, ever since he was five years old and the foster carer he lived with for two months dumped him in a reception class, and a boy with bright red hair chucked paint down Kili's clothes and spun him round till he fell over.

Things have never really improved much. He's been through three other schools since, all of them pretty dreadful, but he thinks this one, Sowter Hill, is the worst of the lot. It's a “community school and technology college” which is a fancy way of saying they're inclusive but they focus on maths and science and all the other stuff Kili is rubbish at.

That isn't why he hates it. In fact, the lessons are probably the best part. They're not _interesting_ , but the classrooms have single desks and he can keep his head down, and that way it's less obvious he hasn't got anyone to talk to.

Well, that's not completely true. He's got Ori. They're friends mostly because they both have weird names, but they don't have many classes together. To be honest, Kili gets picked on more when he hangs around with Ori. That's why they have to meet up sort of in secret, otherwise they just seem to make things worse for each other.

Kili's on his way to the library now in fact, crossing the playground with his head down. It's a trip he makes every day; he has to dodge the same footballs and big groups of catty girls and rowdy boys, and he has to duck under arms and through doors and down long, winding corridors that stink of antiseptic and mud and mens' deodorant and remind Kili of a big, maze-like prison. Fili was right, he thinks grimly, traipsing into the library; it's just like jail.

He finds Ori in the Arts section, like always. Ori is _amazing_ at drawing. It would actually be really cool if he didn't ruin it by knitting and sewing and _weaving_. He actually _weaves_. He doesn't do it at school – even Ori's not that stupid – but he makes scarves and hats and gloves and wears them over his uniform. It's obvious they're handmade so people call him all sorts of names for it. He says he doesn't care. He must think Kili doesn't care either, because he knitted a scarf for him at Christmas. Kili only wore it once before stuffing it at the bottom of his sock drawer. He feels awful every time he sees it.

“Hi, Ori. Good weekend?”

“Brilliant!” Ori chirps, closing his book. _The Craft of Pyrography_. He really is weird sometimes. “Dori took me to Museum Gardens and I got loads of great photos of the abbey. I'm going to paint it, I think. It's a Benedictine abbey, and it used to be the richest in the whole of the north of England, did you know that?” He speaks quickly, in a tiny whisper so the librarian doesn't shout at them. “Dori said you could've come with us, but I told him you were meeting your brother this weekend.”

Dori is Ori's brother. He's quite a bit older and he's extremely fussy and strict. Ori's forever complaining about him, but he never really means it.

“Ori!” Kili gives him a little push. “You're not supposed to tell anyone about that.”

“Why not? It's not like you can keep a brother hidden. You can't do a Mr Rochester and lock him up in the attic. So? What's he like?”

“He's... I don't know, he's just a brother.”

“What's that mean?”

“Means I don't like him very much.”

“Oh.” Ori looks confused for a moment. “Don't you get on?”

“Not much. Uncle Thorin said he needs time to settle in, whatever that means. All he does is sleep and ignore me and, get this, he's not even come to school today. He told Uncle he would, but he's buggered off. He's sixteen, you'd think he'd be less of a baby about everything.”

“Well...” Ori says carefully.

“What?”

“He _has_ just been taken away from his mum.”

“I was taken away from her too.”

“But you were only little.”

“So? That makes it worse. You need your mum more when you're little. It was harder for me!”

But even as he says it, Kili knows it isn't really true. He barely remembers his mum. Well, he remembers bits. He remembers their flat; the thick, light green carpet in the living room and the wallpaper stuck to the kitchen cupboards. He remembers spinning in a bedroom, arms outstretched, like a helicopter, and Fili doing the same, and he thinks his mother might have been there, spinning too.

And his last memory, though this is the haziest of the lot, is of himself standing up in a crib, screaming and yelling himself hoarse and rattling the bars. But he told this last secret to Thorin, about a year ago, in complete confidentiality, cheeks burning at the thought of himself crying so much, and his uncle had snorted and shrugged it off. “You must have dreamt it,” he'd said. “There's no way you could remember being in your crib. You were far too young.”

That's all Kili's got. Does he miss her? His mother? He thinks about her, but half of the time he doesn't even think of her as Mum; just Dís, sometimes Bloody Dís, since that's how Thorin always mutters it under his breath when he thinks Kili can't hear.

Ori must realise this too, because he's looking at Kili with shy eyes, and even though he isn't saying anything it's obvious what he's thinking. Kili gives him another push.

“Stop looking at me like that,” he says. “You don't know, Ori, you weren't there.”

“Sorry,” Ori mumbles, toeing at the carpet. “Will I get to meet him then? Your brother?”

“Not today. I told you, he's skived off, hasn't he? Gone into town.”

“But he can't do that for long. They'll have him on a register. They'll ring your uncle and ask where he is.”

Kili gnaws on his lip uncertainly. “D'you think?” he says, even though he's been thinking the exact same thing. “He'll get bollocked. And then _I'll_ get bollocked.”

“Why would you get...” Ori trails off. He hates swearing.

“For letting him!” says Kili. “God, I already hate him.”

“Oh, don't say that!”

Ori hates the word 'hate', too. The bell rings, which is just as well because Kili doesn't really like snapping at Ori. Sometimes he doesn't leave him any choice though; he can be so bloody sensible and simpering all the time. It drives Kili mad.

They go their separate ways, but once Kili's sitting in his maths classroom he suddenly wishes Ori were here after all. He _hates_ maths, he's absolutely useless at it. His teacher last year, Miss Golding, was actually alright. She was patient, at least. But this year he's got Mr Swift and he's a total _bastard_ , and even if no one tries picking on Kili during class time Mr Swift is enough of a bully to make up for it. He's started off the lesson by setting them ten questions – “simple tasks to get your brains in gear, boys and girls” – and they're all _problems_.

'Sunny and Anfisa share out £40 in the ratio 5:3, in that order. How much do they each get?'

He knows it should be easy. It's only ratio, for God's sake, but the numbers squiggle madly on the page and all he can think is _what kind of names are Sunny and Anfisa?_ Not that he has much room to talk; he's got a pretty duff name himself. Obviously other people are thinking the same, because Jack Jacobs turns around to him and says with false sweetness, “Hey, _your_ name should be on this, Durin.”

Mr Swift walks by, hears him, and actually laughs. “Political correctness takes precedence these days, Mr Jacobs.”

He's such a bastard. He's probably the kind of freak who still thinks canes should be used in schools.

Jack's still looking at Kili when their teacher walks on (though not before peering at Kili's paper and giving an amused little nod). Kili gives him a sneer, acting bored. He'd never let Jack know that he's terrified of him, just like everyone else is. He's the worst of the lot.

They have to mark their own papers, and Kili gets only two out of an attempted five right. He scribbles on the paper for the rest of the class, while everyone else divides fractions. It's not that he's stupid. He isn't. He's not too bad at English, and he's the best in his Design Tech class, and he's alright at science if it's biology stuff. His teachers don't like him, but that's mainly because he's scruffy and quiet. Kili doesn't care. He doesn't like them either.

Jack's waiting for him outside at the end of the lesson. He doesn't always do it. It depends what sort of mood he's in. Today he's in a very, very _bad_ mood. Bad for Kili, anyway. Jack waits until the classroom door is shut and everybody's filed out before grabbing Kili by the shoulders and peering right into his face.

“Sorry, Kili, don't mind me, mate. Just wanted to have a good old look at that face of yours – didn't break that nose the other day, did I?”

Someone else – Kili doesn't see who – wrenches his head back with blunt fingernails that scrape against his scalp.

“Nah,” they say, “doesn't look like it. Shame really. It's so bloody big a bit of remodelling might do him some good.”

“Yeah, Durin,” says Jack, squaring up to him now, “how's a bit of remodelling sound?”

“Get off!” Kili yelps, struggling.

His eyes dart round for a gap in the bodies, but they're closed in tight. There aren't many of them, but right now it feels like hundreds. They all feign astonishment.

“Come on, we're mates you and me, aren't we?” says Jack, pretending to put an arm around his shoulder. “I'm doing you a favour.”

Kili reaches up and shoves him the exact moment the classroom door opens again, and Swift wanders out with his flask of coffee.

“Boys!” he barks, but when he sees who it is he offers up a shark smile. “Come on now, you lot. Don't want to spend your break indoors, do you? Off you go now.”

“Yeah alright, come on, lads,” Jack huffs, dawdling. “Come on, Kili. Come outside with us.”

Kili backs away so quickly he practically falls straight into Mr Swift, and a bit of coffee splatters on the red concrete floor.

“For goodness' sake, Kili, watch your feet, you clumsy boy,” he snaps, and all the others snigger. Swift gives him a tiny push on the shoulder, and Kili's immediate thought is whether or not he can get him done for that. God, he'd love to see something bad come this bastard's way. All of their ways. He hates them all. He _hates_ them.

He wishes it wouldn't happen. Of course he does, it's stupid to pretend otherwise. People take one look at his scruffy clothes and hair, hear his name for the first time, and their lips curl.

But that isn't the whole reason, surely? There are loads of poor kids at their school, and loads of kids with weirder names than Kili. There must be something _about_ Kili. Something draws them to him. Or drew Jack Jacobs to him, and everyone else followed. Thorin says he's too lippy for his own good sometimes, that's why they pick on him. He treats Kili's problems with a kind of quiet embarrassment, something to _get through_ rather than actually overcome.

He's in the kitchen when Kili gets home that afternoon. Kili dumps his bag in the hallway and is just about to go into his room when he hears his uncle's voice summoning him. He sounds angry. Kili isn't sure why – he isn't late today, after all. But then he goes into the kitchen, and Fili's standing in front of Thorin, and soon it all makes sense.

“You okay?” he says carefully.

“Kili,” Thorin says in a low voice, “since Fili won't give me a proper answer, I'll have to ask you. Did your brother go to school with you today?”

Kili freezes.

“Well...” He glances at Fili, who looks urgently back at him, fingers curled into loose fists. “He...”

He doesn't get to finish. Thorin just nods, shortly, like it's all the confirmation he needs, and says, “Go to your room for a bit. Go on now.”

So Kili does, and he closes the door tight behind himself so he doesn't have to listen. In his bedroom he opens the wardrobe and pulls out his little wooden box and finds Bofur's clockwork mouse inside. He crawls on to his bed and sets the mouse off on his night stand, watching it whirl in circles till it runs out of breath completely. When the noise from the kitchen grows louder he sets the mouse off a second time and covers his ears with his hands, so that all he can hear is the muffled clockwork whirring.

Minutes later the door to his bedroom bangs inwards and Fili comes storming in. Kili takes his hands away from his ears just in time to hear him snap, “Why did you _do_ that?”

Kili shuffles backwards on the bed, away from him. “Do what?” he mumbles.

“Tell him!”

“I didn't tell him anything...”

“You could have just said yes! You didn't have to... for God's sake, what _is_ that?”

He means the whirring noise, and when he spots the mouse still circling Kili's night stand he leans and grabs it and clasps it hard while it shakes in his hand, wheeled feet kicking.

Kili lunges forward. “Give it back!”

And Fili _so clearly_ considers doing just that, but then he looks at Kili and he looks at the toy in his hand, and in a second he turns and wrenches his arm back and lobs it straight at the wardrobe door, and the little mouse shatters into a dozen tiny pieces.

The room goes quiet. Kili can't believe Fili would be so hateful. It was his fault that he'd gotten into trouble with Thorin, but why did he have to take it out on Kili? So Kili growls and lunges off the bed and shoves Fili hard, so that he stumbles against the wardrobe and crunches more of the toy pieces with his heavy boots.

He looks surprised for a moment. Then his expression twists into something ugly.

“Don't touch me!” he snarls, giving Kili a shove of his own.

“Then don't touch my stuff!” Kili barks back. “You broke it! You have your side of the room so just _stay_ there!” and he pushes Fili straight back into the wardrobe doors so they clatter, and that's enough to make Fili snap.

Kili feels big hands on his shoulders, shoving him back hard, harder than any of the boys at school. His feet stumble clumsily together and he lands on his bed, and his body slips down and threatens to fall to the floor but Fili's there to pin him down, one hard arm across Kili's chest so he can barely _breathe_ , and the other fighting back against Kili's own hands.

This close, Kili can see how blue his brother's eyes are, how deeply crimson the angry flush of his cheeks is, see the scruffy golden stubble along his jaw, and they are not alike, they are not alike at all, not in looks nor in fighting technique, because Fili fights with his whole big body, pinning Kili with every bone and muscle, and Kili thrashes and attacks with his hands and feet like a cat and he claws at Fili's long hair and any bit of skin he can grab, until eventually he has to yell, “ _Get_ off _me, you bastard!_ ” because Fili's fist is about to sink straight into his jaw.

Heavy footsteps come running, and suddenly Fili is gone. Thorin has him, and he's pulling his arms back, and Fili is writhing and shouting and _swearing_ , astonishing, vicious stuff even Kili wouldn't say, and Thorin is telling him to _calm down now, for Christ's sake_ , and Fili's clearly having _none_ of it.

Kili sprawls panting on his bed, watching as his brother tires himself out. Eventually, Thorin lets go.

He sets up a bed on the sofa for Kili that night. He's letting him sleep there after all. Kili scoops up all the bits of dead clockwork mouse and pours them into a cup and then, unsure what exactly to do with it all, he puts it on his windowsill.

Fili's on his own bed now, curled up on his side with his eyes closed. He stays there all evening. He isn't made to apologise, but when Kili goes into the living room that night Thorin gives him a quick half-hug and ruffles his hair and tells him to sleep well, and it's a bit like _he's_ saying sorry instead.


	5. Chapter 5

Fili starts going to school after that. Thorin's so relieved he offers to take them somewhere at the weekend, anywhere they fancy. Kili's rather pleased about this – they haven't been to the archery range in Scarborough for ages, and then of course there's the market in Scarborough too. He wouldn't mind going to pretty Peasholm Park, or the castle overlooking the North Sea, or the lake in Weaponness Valley. Or even the Scarborough Fair Collection; they went with Mr Baggins once and there were all these shiny steam engines and carriages filled with wild flowers and carousels and mechanical theatres. Kili pestered Thorin to have a go on the coconut shy and he won this huge lopsided teddy bear with an anxious expression. It was far too big for their flat. He ended up giving it to a charity shop.

But now Thorin just laughs when Kili suggests the Fair Collection.

“Don't be ridiculous, Kili. It's closed in the winter time, it's far too cold.”

In the end it turns out to be pointless asking anyway; Fili doesn't want to do anything at _all_ , not even go to the arcades or the shopping centre or the park. He just wants to sit on his bed with his headphones on and that stupid book in his lap.

Kili lies on his own bed and glares at him over the top of his homework. He's moved back into the bedroom now after a couple of nights on the couch, but the tension between them is horribly present. Every time Blue so much as gives a brief twitter Fili's eyes narrow ever so slightly. Kili's waiting for the day Fili wrenches open the window and lobs the birdcage right out onto the street, Blue and all.

Lorna comes back round to the flat on Saturday afternoon, even though she's only supposed to visit once a fortnight. He knows he isn't allowed but Kili lingers at the living room door to listen in on her and Thorin, anxious to know whether or not Fili is going to be kicked out for good. He hopes he is. He wants his bedroom back.

But eavesdropping proves useless in the end anyway; Lorna isn't saying anything Kili is interested in.

“Looking after children who are away from their parents is always a challenge. It involves everyone in the household and requires patience, communication, cooperation...”

“Fili's hardly a child,” Thorin says gruffly. “And it's a bit much to ask Kili to be patient. I could barely get him to be the least bit patient _before_ Fili arrived. He's a handful all by himself.”

Kili flinches. Is he really a handful?

“No one expects this to be an easy ride for you or your nephews, but the rewards for all of you could be enormous. By the end of it your boys will have a much greater understanding of other people's difficulties and the importance of sharing. Hopefully they'll share a wonderful friendship, too. Obviously this will require a lot of quality time spent together, but you're aware that we provide a planned breaks service to all foster carers. Weekends away, days out, mini holidays, that sort of thing. Many carers find it very beneficial.”

“We don't need a holiday,” Thorin growls. “We don't need team-building activities or any of that nonsense. They've been through a lot, both of them, and they need... they need...” He lets out a frustrated sigh. “They need _something_.”

“Every child who comes into care is different,” Lorna says patiently. “Many of them have faced extreme hardship and difficulties, you're right. Fili has been through a lot, in the past year especially. Losing his stepfather –”

“Not his stepfather,” Thorin interrupts. “Just a man.”

“He was engaged to your sister, and Fili referred to him as his stepfather. They were close.”

Kili's ears prick up at that. Stepfather? His mum was going to get re-married? And she didn't even _say_?

“He was a waste of space,” Thorin gripes, “just like their father.”

“I should stress the importance of not expressing these sentiments to the boys –”

“Of course I don't,” Thorin snaps.

He doesn't, it's true. He barely ever mentions Dís if he can help it, let alone Kili's real father. He left before Kili was born. Kili's never even seen a photo of him. Not that he cares; he doesn't _want_ to know about him. He can't be much of a decent bloke if he walked out on his pregnant girlfriend and year-old son, leaving them in some rubbish flat in south London.

“The boys are home, aren't they?” he hears Lorna say now. “Maybe we could get them both in here for a little chat?”

Kili scrambles back into his bedroom, and Fili rolls his eyes.

“He'll know you've been listening in,” he huffs, not looking up from his journal. “You're hardly subtle.”

“He won't,” says Kili, but he isn't so sure. The flat's small, after all, and Thorin has bat ears.

Lorna has them sit side by side on the couch, far too close. She smiles a red lipsticky smile at them.

“I bet it's pretty weird sharing a bedroom, isn't it?” she says, once Kili's been told to make her a fresh cup of tea.

The imprint of her lipstick stays on the rim of the mug after she's sipped from it. Kili can't help but stare; it looks horrible.

“How do you find that arrangement?" she asks. "Do you like it?”

No one speaks for a few moments. Then Kili clears his throat.

“I wouldn't choose it,” he says.

“Kili,” Thorin snaps.

“No, that's alright,” says Lorna, turning to him. “It's best if everyone is honest. We want everyone to be happy and open, don't we?”

Except Kili's honesty doesn't have the effect he desired. He thought maybe Lorna might suggest Fili move out altogether, as a result of the discomfort his presence is causing poor neglected Kili and all that. No, all she does is make Thorin go and fetch Mr Baggins from his bedsit downstairs, and then suggests Fili and Kili spend Sunday together, helping him in his shop.

Mr Baggins glances nervously at Fili and gulps, as though he thinks letting _him_ anywhere near his shop will result in a dozen smashed terracotta pots and an empty cash register. But he doesn't say no. Unfortunately.

“Now, I've got these frost-proof pots for you, boys. They're ideal for long-term planting which is what we want today because we're doing perennials,” Mr Baggins bristles the next day, elbowing between them and placing two heavy pots on the counter of his shop. “They're a bit heavy so be careful. The extra weight is what gives them their stability. On the other hand their porous quality means the compost will dry out quickly and need regular watering, though I daresay all this rain we've been having will do the trick nicely.”

“Not a clue what he's on about,” Fili mutters once Mr Baggins has wandered off to begin rummaging in another part of the shop, humming to himself. “Look at this, the bloody cheek of it. This is child labour, this is.”

Kili looks at him. “Aren't you sixteen?”

“So?”

Kili shrugs and turns back to his pot, shovelling compost. It falls to the bottom with a satisfying thud. What's Mr Baggins always fussing about? This is easy. He wouldn't mind doing this for a job. 

“When's your birthday?” he asks after a while. He hates silence, especially when he's standing right next to someone.

Fili doesn't answer.

“Mine's next Saturday,” Kili says anyway. “The twenty-first. I'll be fifteen.”

“Big deal,” Fili mutters.

“Uncle's taking me to the archery range in Scarborough.”

“Archery?”

“I used to do it all the time. There was a bloke who lived on this street a few houses away, he taught me. He had a kid who was really good at it. Better than me, obviously, but I could beat him. Honestly. _Sometimes_. Anyway, they fell out, Uncle Thorin and this guy. I can't remember over what, just that one day I wasn't allowed to go round their house anymore. It was stupid. I still got to go to the shooting grounds for a bit, but last year they put the price up...”

“And you and your uncle are poor, right?”

“We're not poor! Thorin runs his own shop.”

“Like that means a thing. Any old fool can open a shop, doesn't mean you can keep it going. Especially not if you're just selling tacky bits of jewellery.”

Kili gives him a shove with his mud-caked hands, leaving prints on Fili's t-shirt. “It's not tacky! It's expensive!”

“Even more reason it'll fail. The last place you wanna open an expensive shop is round here, s'full of complete dossers.”

“You don't know anything about it, you've only been here a week.” Kili thinks about it, then adds, “A week too long.”

“Shut it, you.”

“ _You_ shut it.”

Fili picks up the trowel beside his pot, and for one minute Kili thinks he's going to get whacked over the head with it.

“I'm warning you...”

“What you gonna do, then?” says Kili, only a bit nervous. "Trowel me?”

“I bloody should. Then they'd send me back, away from _this_ fucking dump.”

“Back where?” He has to hurt Fili, so that Fili doesn't hurt him first. “Not to your step-dad. He's gone and left you, hasn't he? And I don't blame him – anyone would do the same.”

Fili's eyes flash with something which might be surprise. He sticks the trowel in the pot, and for a moment Kili thinks that's the end of it. He's _won_.

A hand, quick and heavy, comes up and around, pressing hard against Kili's back, holding him down so that the edge of the counter digs painfully into his stomach, and moments later the neck of his shirt is being ripped back and something soft and crumbly-wet is smearing and tumbling down his bare back. Kili yelps and lashes out and catches Fili right on the nose with the back of his hand.

“Oi! You little –”

“Hey hey hey!” Mr Baggins comes bustling in, knocking over a pair of bay trees as he goes. “What on earth's going on in here? Is that – is that my _compost_? Are you fighting with my reduced peat compost? That's eighty pence a litre!”

“It was him!” Kili roars, trying to get the slimy stuff out the back of his t-shirt.

“Me?!” Fili snaps, rubbing his nose. “Oh you really are an insufferable little snitch, aren't you –”

“Right!” says Mr Baggins. “That's it! I'm getting your uncle. You two stay right here. And put those trowels down this instant, you'll take each other's fingers off.”

Fili tosses his on the counter with a huff. Kili lays his next to it, anger ebbing away in the face of disappointment. He hates getting into trouble with Thorin, _and_ Mr Baggins. He couldn't give a toss about getting into trouble at school – it's not like he cares about any of that lot – and he doesn't care about what Fili thinks either, but Thorin always has a way to make him feel terrible, and Mr Baggins is _always_ there to back him up.

He bobs around in the background now while Thorin looks between the two of them. He's still wearing his reading glasses. Clearly he'd been using the opportunity of the quiet flat to get some work done. Now he's been bothered.

He looks slowly between them. He isn't happy. “Would you like to hazard a guess as to how long you two managed to stay down here without causing trouble?”

Neither of them speak. Fili doesn't even have the good grace to look at least a bit ashamed. He's picking compost boredly from his fingernails.

Thorin tells them anyway. “Fifteen minutes. You couldn't even manage half an hour.”

“It was just a bit of mud, for Christ's sake,” says Fili.

“Eighty pence a litre!” Mr Baggins pipes up from the back.

Fili digs in the pocket of his scruffy jeans, brings out a clutch of coins and scatters them on the counter. “Happy now?”

“Don't be smart,” says Thorin.

“Why are you making such a big deal out of this? You don't have to come down and act the inspector. It was a bit of mud down his shirt. And anyway,” Fili throws Kili a look, “ _he_ was spouting off, not me.”

“You were! You were saying all sorts of stuff!”

“Quiet, both of you,” Thorin snaps. “And since you asked, my concern lies in the fact that you two can't even handle the simple task of potting some... _bloody_ flowers without...” He doesn't finish, curling and uncurling his fingers with this long, sharp exhale right through his nose, so loud Kili can hear it.

Mr Baggins steps forward hesitantly, offering his assistance, but Thorin shakes his head.

“Get upstairs, both of you. Kili, clean your back and change your clothes. And you, Fili...” He hesitates. He doesn't want to be too harsh with Fili. Kili knows this. “You just get to your room. Wash your hands first.”

They trudge upstairs and clamour for space in the tiny bathroom.

“You put mud all down my back so shove off, I need the bathroom,” says Kili, pulling his t-shirt up and over his head, dropping it on the floor at his feet.

“For God's sake, just let me wash my hands and then I can get out of here!”

“Wash them in the kitchen!”

Kili shoves him and, gratifyingly, Fili stumbles against the door. He recovers quickly, straightens himself out and shoves Kili right back, sending him into the side of the bath. Kili almost topples straight in, knees bending, but grabs onto the wall just in time though his wet fingers slip against the tiles.

The cold tap on the sink is already running, and swiftly Kili holds his fingers cupped beneath the freezing stream and bats a whole handful of it straight into Fili's face, watches as Fili splutters and gasps with something like anger... no, not anger. Laughter. He's _laughing_.

“Fuck off,” he chuckles, wiping his wet face. “Jesus, you're like a little dog. You just won't give up. You were always –” He cuts himself short, shakes his head. “Just let me wash my hands and I'll get out, yeah?”

Kili looks at him for a moment, before finally stepping back. It's freezing in here – Thorin won't let them keep the heater in the bathroom on even in winter – and he wraps his arms around himself to get the point across that he wants Fili to hurry the hell up.

“Yeah, yeah, you're chilled to the bone,” says Fili, rolling his eyes. He turns the tap off and grabs a towel. “Alright?”

Kili gives a short nod. Fili seems to have brightened up considerably in the space of about five minutes, but Kili still finds himself feeling wary. Slowly, he steps forward.

Silence, careful but not entirely uncomfortable, passes between them for a few moments. Fili chucks the towel at Kili's chest.

“Sorry about the mud,” he says, and leaves.

This is interesting, Kili thinks, watching the door. He wrings the towel hard in his hands. He's still not entirely sure he wants to be friends. He's still not sure he even _likes_ Fili much at all. But Fili apologised, just now, outright. He surrendered and Kili didn't, and that just demonstrates Kili's superior willpower, doesn't it?

On the other hand, acknowledging all this means that, really, Kili knows he should be saying sorry too. Well. Maybe.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to [the-angry-pixie](http://the-angry-pixie.tumblr.com/) for helping me out big time ♥
> 
> Warnings for OCs and intense descriptions of bullying, don't read if this will upset you.

Thorin doesn't normally leave the shop before five o'clock, but on Friday they have an appointment at the office where Lorna works. It's right on the other side of town, next to the walk-in centre and the scrubby local football pitch, so he's picking Kili and Fili up straight from school. Which would be fine, except school finishes at 3:30 and that means Kili has half an hour to kill before he can leave.

Lessons are alright; it's mid-morning break and the endless lunch hour which are the problem. Usually he can flit away into the library with Ori or hunch up in the far field games shed with its leaking roof. He has to perch amongst shuttlecocks and upturned marker discs half-full with dank water in there, but at least it's safe and quiet.

But the library and the shed and most of the classrooms are locked after school, and though Kili toys with the idea of wandering up to the shops or barging in on after-school club with the rest of the kids whose parents don't want them, he rushes to the boys' toilets as soon as the bell goes and locks himself in the end cubicle.

He digs in his pocket and pulls out one of Bofur's clockwork toys, a little blue bird with long feet and big, round eyes, a bronze key sticking out of its back. It's supposed to flap its wings and shake its tail, but Bofur gave it to Kili as a project to see if _he_ could get it to work. He's been at it for a whole week now, trying to figure out its obscure mechanics, and he might nearly be there. Bofur's already shown him how to use tiny pliers, files and brass hammers, but all Kili's got with him today is a little screwdriver.

He sets to work, and for a little while, as the school empties out, he sits peacefully, if a bit awkwardly, even growing accustomed to the cold and stench of the bathroom. He twists a last minuscule screw, jerks the key and suddenly the bird begins to skitter noisily in his palm, its tiny motor whirring. He clicks the blue plastic back into place and watches, delighted, at the way it flaps its wings and pecks soundlessly, eyes alert as though truly looking for something. Its tail is a little jarred, but that's nothing a smear of oil won't fix.

He watches it for a while until the door to the bathroom bangs inwards and a whole parade of boys stomp in. They're grunting and jeering, kicking at the bins. He knows it's Jack – Kili would recognise that scratchy snarl of a voice anywhere.

What are they _doing_ in here? School finished ages ago, but – of course. It's Friday, _rugby_ day, and just as Kili remembers this he hears a scrape of Astros right outside his cubicle, and a bit of dry mud tumbles beneath the door.

He claps a hand over the bird to shut it up and hoists his feet up on to the toilet seat, recoiling as someone bangs loudly on his door. His heart stops. It takes him a moment to realise they're not trying to come in. One of the boys is leaning against it, his filthy legs crossed, as he snorts about some girl who's “pretty fit, actually, she's just had her tits done”. All the boys keep up this long, pointless conversation for ages, shouting to each other from their individual cubicles, apparently oblivious to the last one being locked. It's not unusual; loads of boys lock the cubicle doors and climb out over the top just for a laugh. As long as Kili stays quiet...

He hunches right over so the bird digs uncomfortably into his stomach, pressing his nose against his knees, breathing quietly. He doesn't breathe normally again until they've cleared off, and even then he counts ten minutes in his head from the moment the bathroom falls silent and then unlocks the door and goes back out into the corridor.

It's completely deserted. All the lights in this part of the building have been dimmed, and all the other leftover kids have been shepherded into the assembly hall for after-school club. If Kili makes himself forget about them, he can almost kid himself he's walking around some deserted sanatorium. Some of the older kids tell the younger ones this place was an old mad house, but it's only a joke. Still, Kili can see why people would believe it: he treads quietly through the long, dimmed corridors, stretching into darkness, and half-believes there's something down each one, waiting for him.

Some people feel this way in hospitals; on edge, uneasy, sick. Kili feels this way at school. A clock on the wall says it's ten to four, and when he walks outside it's raining and the playground is empty. He sees them as soon as he turns the corner on to the street. Jack and all of his friends – masses of them, it feels like – waiting just past the bus stop, still in their muddy clothes. They aren't sheltering from the rain, as though they're trying to prove some kind of point.

Kili takes a step back. He thinks about going back into school, legging it across the playground, down the corridors, back into the boys' toilets. But if they see him they'll only run after him.

Maybe he could walk in the other direction, round the corner of the street. It isn't the right way, but he's got ten minutes to spare. He can wait it out.

No, he can't.

They've seen him now. They're nudging each other, they're smirking, muttering, pushing away from the bus stop walls with their grubby rugby boots, and even though Kili is sure they don't give him a second thought at any other time in their day, he suddenly feels as if all of them at the bus stop – even the older ones who aren't Jack's mates and are looking disinterestedly in the other direction – are thinking how much they'd like to get Kili right now.

So instead of bolting he stops; freezes. Someone calls his name. His last name. It isn't Jack, it's someone Kili doesn't recognize, a lanky new addition. Kili's fame as a freak must be spreading. Finally his feet unstick and he carries on walking, head down, bag thumping. Thorin tells him to ignore them. He's said it enough times that it's part of Kili's mantra now. But they're getting nearer, or he is, and he knows they're speaking but he can't tell what they're saying, the words are just blurry jeers pattering through his ears with the rain. 

Suddenly they're in front of him, and there doesn't seem much point in trying to ignore them anymore. Jack darts out at the front and smiles. He's always _smiling_ at him, shark's teeth framed by acne and unnecessary shaving scars, the look a cat gets before pouncing. It's supposed to be ironic, but he thinks Kili doesn't know that. He thinks Kili is thick.

He can see the spit on Jack's lips when he speaks, and it's only briefly that Kili glances over his shoulder, looking longingly at the school gate, but they all laugh anyway. They start speaking, every sound wiggling its way into his brain to stay put, but it's the same old stuff: his name, his family, the way he looks. It hurts, it always hurts, but it isn't the worst part.

One of them reaches out, clips him round the temple to tug out a reaction, and they fall about laughing at his growl of indignation. He can feel himself beginning to tremble, heating up quick in spite of the rain, but he tries to remember what Thorin tells him to do in these situations. He makes the mistake of trying to march past, and two of the boys take an arm each, hanging on to him. He freezes. Then he begins to struggle.

Panic grips him. His vision blurs, though from rain or dizziness he can't tell. He hates people hanging on to him, he _hates_ being backed up like a cornered mouse. He feels his throat begin to tighten, and now his shoulders are pressing hard against the wet school rails, rainwater dripping in his eyes, soaking through his shirt, the metal bruising. He knows they can't really hurt him in school but _here_ , now, with no one about, it's like he's finally for it at last.

He should have run for it.

They close in on him, all of them, barely touching him at first. He hits out anyway and that makes them snap; _Jack_ snaps. He grabs Kili by his shirt collar but Kili squirms before the grip grows tight and shoves him away; Jack stumbles, a surprised look on his face, lunges as Kili darts out from between two boys and runs straight into someone else.

“Kili!”

He looks up and there's Fili, holding him at arms' length, blond hair dark with rain. He looks as sullen as always, but for once he isn't pointing the look at Kili.

“What do you think you're doing?” he demands, looking straight at the group of boys. He's got his eye on the biggest one. Fili isn't as tall as him but he's older and much fiercer, and they all look a bit surprised. But Jack steps forward, grinning.

“Who the fuck are you?” he asks.

“Mind your own business,” says Fili. Actually he doesn't say exactly that; he says something much worse so that they all stare at him, shocked. He grabs Kili's arm, right where it's still hurting, and drags him straight through the small crowd along with him and off down the street. Kili pulls away as soon as he gets a chance.

“You don't have to hold my hand,” he snaps, so Fili gives him a little shove and sends him staggering back into the gates. “Stop bloody pushing me around!”

His voice breaks and he hates himself for it. Fili stops in the street and looks at him. His expression has changed.

“Sorry,” he mutters.

“Thought you hated me,” says Kili. Fili shakes his head, but not as though he's disagreeing.

“Don't be so dramatic. Come on, Thorin's waiting up here.”

They don't have a car of their own, so Thorin's had to borrow Dwalin's. He's this big Scottish guy, Thorin's very oldest friend, and he helps run the shop in town. He isn't in the car today. Kili's glad. He knows he's nearly fifteen, but anyone would find Mr Dwalin scary.

Fili doesn't say a word the whole way there, not even about the bus stop incident, and Kili relaxes into his seat, pulse finally returning to normal, the pain in his arms gradually fading. He stares out the window at the grey, winter-dark streets, remembering vividly the cool press of metal against his back. He races raindrops down the window and feels a shiver of relief at the weekend stretched ahead of him; two whole days of being at home, safe.

–

Fili doesn't mention it at all until they get back to the flat. Even then he waits until after dinner, when Thorin has gone downstairs to have a cup of tea with Mr Baggins. Fili sits on his bed with that sketchbook of his, nibbling the end of a pencil. Kili pulls his wooden box out of the wardrobe, snaffles the tiny container of sewing machine oil Mr Baggins gave him and sets to work on fixing the clockwork bird's tail. Normally this is his safe place, the one thing he can concentrate on properly without thinking about anything else. Now he's distracted; he can feel Fili watching him out of the corner of his eye.

“Stop staring at me,” he says when it starts to get annoying. He doesn't look up, but he can just about see Fili shake his head.

“Right,” he mumbles, “dreaming.” Then follows a long, long silence, though it's clear he wants to say something else. It's almost like he's embarrassed. Finally he comes out with it: “You know at school...”

“What about it?”

“Those lads...”

“Was nothing.”

“Kili –”

“It was nothing!”

“Fine, bugger you then,” Fili snaps. Then he sighs. “It's alright, you know. Well, it's not, but if you're getting bullied... I mean, you're allowed to say.”

“I'm not getting _bullied_!” Bullied. It's such a stupid, childish word. Kili looks away out of the window, as though the frosty panes can stop his own face turning beetroot red.

“Well they didn't look very chummy to me.”

“I just mean...” Kili hesitates. “It happens to everyone, you know, at least once or twice. Oh they're just wankers, it doesn't matter.” He flicks the clockwork bird on and off again, then puts it back in the box. He suddenly doesn't feel much like fixing things anymore.

“They hurt you, didn't they?” Fili presses, in this matter of fact voice that doesn't seem to reveal much concern at all. “That big fella that had hold of you, looked like he could bloody swallow you, he had a smack at you, didn't he?”

Kili feels the familiar gurgle of rage blossom in his gut, and wrenches his head up. “They didn't _hurt_ me! I can look after myself, I don't need _you_ showing me up again. And since when do you give a toss anyway? I just don't want to think about it, alright?”

Fili huffs and opens his sketch book and begins to scribble, then stops. “Does... Thorin know?” he asks. Kili clambers off his bed and goes into the kitchen. Fili follows. “I'm not having a go at you, but it's not alright to let people push you around like that.”

“Why do you care?” Kili throws over his shoulder.

“Oh anyone would, you touchy little brat. It's just not fair, is it? All them lot picking on a little kid like you.”

Kili spins round to face him. “I'm not a little kid! I'm fifteen tomorrow! You're barely older.”

“Not a little kid, right,” Fili scoffs. “Look at you, you're a squirt.”

He reaches out a hand. Instinctively Kili ducks, thinking he's going to get whacked. Fili blinks in surprise.

“And a jumpy one at that.” His eyes narrow. “They _have_ been giving you a hard time, haven't they? A lot, I mean?”

“Everyone gets it.”

“Yeah? And what's your crime, eh?”

“I've got a stupid name and a big nose,” Kili mumbles.

Fili throws his head back and laughs. A _proper_ laugh; it would almost sound nice if he weren't laughing at Kili.

“Shut up!”

“Oh get a grip,” says Fili. “My name's far worse than yours, and my nose is bigger too. How d'you think I feel? You're lucky you've got the Oakenshield nose, I've got the bloody Durins'.”

His tone is light enough, but Kili is sure he detects at least a hint of venom in Fili's voice when he says this. He leans against the counter top and crosses his big arms across his chest, looking at Kili with an almost unreadable expression, though if Kili had to guess at one emotion flitting across Fili's face right this instant he'd suggest hesitation.

“Look,” Fili says slowly, “I'm not offering to be your bodyguard or anything. But everyone knows we're related now and I'm not gonna be the one with the kid brother who can't stick up for himself.”

“I stick up for myself just fine.”

“Yeah, pull the other one, mate.” He wanders over to the breakfast table and pulls out a chair. The tea towel is sitting on top of the table. He drags it towards himself and begins wringing it in his hands, like he's struggling over what to say.

Kili doesn't know why he's doing this. But when they went to see Lorna earlier this afternoon she spoke to all three of them separately, very softly and carefully. When she spoke to Kili in the big, sparse meeting room, she came out with all sorts of guff about “family time” and “quiet time” and keeping journals and thoughts diaries and all that kind of junk. Maybe she said it all to Fili too. Maybe this is his idea of family time.

More likely he really just doesn't want to be humiliated at school.

Kili doesn't understand brothers.

Then again, Fili isn't really his brother, is he?

Yes, he is.

Kili looks at him across the table. They don't look a bit alike. Fili said so himself. Kili doesn't have many photographs of Dís, but he knows he's got her dark hair and her long nose. Maybe that's why Thorin gets so ratty with him sometimes. Kili imagines being older, an adult, being landed with _Fili_ 's son to look after, having to face the constant reminder of Fili every day across the breakfast table. He'd probably get annoyed too.

“You won't believe me,” Fili says eventually, “but if you want them to leave you alone, just ignore them.”

Kili stares at him in disbelief. “Ignore them? You sound like Uncle. He says that all the time.”

“Yeah well, maybe he actually has a point. When people have a go at you, you have to play to your strengths. It's not like you can fight them off.”

“I could.”

“Don't be stupid. You're not stronger than all them so don't kid yourself. Don't even try to do it. All that'll happen is they'll just keep hitting you back harder and harder till one day they break your nose. And you don't seem to have much in the way of brains so you need your looks.”

Kili scowls at this, but he can't ignore the niggling part of him which acknowledges that Fili might be right. Alright, Kili isn't a great fighter. He's one of the smallest boys in his class, the smallest in every class he's ever been in, which is saying a lot. He knows that. But that isn't the point. None of that stops him feeling the _need_ to fight.

It's like a switch gets flicked in his brain, and as soon as someone grabs him or sticks their face right up against his or jerks out their foot to trip him, the tell-tale signs come rushing into him all at once like quick, sniggering demons: the red hot knot in his chest, the lump in his throat, the shamefully pricking eyes and shaking fingers, and the only way he can exorcise the jitters is to lash out. He's always done it. Thorin said when Kili was a little kid he used to kick and bite and scream if he got told off. Sometimes, when Thorin is being particularly unfair, Kili still feels like doing it. It's like he never learned how to flick the switch back off. He can't just stand there and take it. It's so much easier to tell someone to ignore something than to actually try to do it yourself.

There's also a part of him which wonders if Fili is deliberately giving bad advice – if he _wants_ Kili to get hurt.

Kili thinks all this, and yet at the same time finds his mouth speaking without him meaning for it to.

“How do I ignore them then?” he grumbles.

Fili's answer comes easily, as though he's had a long time to think about it. “Just count in your head. Count whatever you want. Don't listen to what they say, just concentrate on what's in your mind.” He taps his temple gently. “I know that might be a bit difficult for you, but I'm sure you'll pick it up soon enough. You know, one, two, three...?”

“Shut up.”

“They don't care about you. They don't go home at night and think about you. They've got their own sad lives to worry about, you know?”

He sounds like he's parroting a social worker, albeit in a slightly less sensitive way. Maybe he is. Kili doesn't know why Fili is helping him, which almost makes him want to assume that he's not.

When Thorin comes in later he's whistling, but he stops when he sees Kili and Fili sitting at the breakfast table and raises his eyebrows instead.

“Everything alright, boys?”

They look at each other. Fili shrugs.

“Changed your mind about coming with us tomorrow, Fili?” asks Thorin, rolling up the sleeves of his jumper to do the washing up.

Fili grunts something into his chest and wanders off into the bedroom. Thorin looks at Kili instead.

“I think we're supposed to take that as a no. Nevermind, Bilbo's got lots of jobs to keep him busy. I'm sure they'll have a smashing time together, eh?”

Kili giggles uncertainly. His uncle's light-hearted moods always bounce along unexpectedly.

“What about you?” says Thorin. “Looking forward to it?”

He's talking about Kili's birthday. They're going to the archery range, but Kili's not really in the mood to get excited about it just now, even though they haven't been in ages. He can't say this or he'll dampen one of Thorin's rare good moods, so he draws a smile on to his face and nods. He quickly grows tired of the effort and slumps down into his seat as soon as Thorin's back is turned.

Birthdays are a strange time. It's not that Kili doesn't like them. He's just never managed to get worked up about them, not even when he was a kid. It's not as though Thorin didn't try to get him excited; Kili remembers him going to great lengths to buy him presents out of the catalogue and then spending the rest of the year paying for them, and setting up little parties in whichever flat they happened to be living in at the time, just the two of them, because there was never anyone else Kili wanted to invite.

The part he likes best about birthdays isn't the presents or the outings. It's getting older. Mr Baggins always says strange things to him like “cherish your youth, Kili” while he huffs and puffs around his shop as though he's thirty years older than his actual age, but Kili doesn't understand this at all. He can't _wait_ to be older, bigger and taller with a proper job so that he can buy all the things he wants, a new bow and set of arrows and a proper tool kit and a television, and a new house for Thorin so he never gets ratty again.

–

As Kili lies in bed that night, Fili snoring softly across the room, he counts the flashes of the bedside clock until it shows midnight, and then whispers a tiny happy birthday to himself. He wonders if she's whispering it too, all the way down in London.

Does she think about him? He thinks about her. Not all the time. Hardly ever at all if he can help it. But every year on his birthday, he imagines how she might have changed in twelve months. She'll still be pretty of course, but bigger, maybe; older. She used to smoke – if he closes his eyes he thinks he can remember the smell of it baked into the front room furniture. If she carried on she'll have wrinkles round her lips now, and maybe crow's feet from laughing. He doesn't know if she laughs much, but he likes to think she does.

He doesn't really miss her because he doesn't know her. But he's ashamed to admit that sometimes, if only once a year, he hopes she misses him.


	7. Chapter 7

The first thing Kili does the next morning is check the post. He slips downstairs in his pyjamas and creeps across the freezing shop floor barefoot, jostling cold, shiny leaves as he goes. He can hear the milkman's van, but it's still dark out. The doormat is empty. He runs his fingers beneath the letterbox to make sure nothing is jammed there, and pulls out a flyer for a pizza place.

Mr Baggins emerges from his bedsit, startled, thinking there's an intruder. He's annoyed when he sees it's only Kili.

“Put some socks on at least, you'll freeze to death,” he huffs. “What on earth are you doing out here?”

“Just checking the post.”

Mr Baggins' expression softens some. He's carrying a huge peace lily in his arms, which he puts down on the counter top with a sigh. He's astonishing: he gets up at six o'clock every morning to prep the shop and see to the plants, all by himself, even though Kili knows he likes sleeping in as much as anyone else. Thorin says it's because he's proud. He certainly looks proud, even bustling around in his patchwork dressing gown. He always walks with his chin right up in the air, like one of those snooty little dogs. When Kili was little he used to follow him around, imitating him, until Thorin saw and told him off.

“The post hasn't come yet, Kili,” says Mr Baggins. “It's barely seven, my terribly boring bills won't be here for a good few hours. Why don't you hop back to bed?”

Kili hesitates, even though he's freezing. Mr Baggins puts an awkward hand on his shoulder.

“If anything comes for you, I'll call you down right away. How about that?”

So Kili nods and goes back upstairs, but he doesn't get back into bed. His birthday cards are on the table in the front room, four of them carefully laid out in bright envelopes. Uncle, Mr Baggins, Nana... and the last one in a hand he doesn't recognise.

His skin prickles. He holds his breath, staring hard. The envelope is lilac. His name and address is swirled on the front in neatly elaborate handwriting, and there's a stamp in the corner, to show it's been posted specially. Kili picks it up and looks at it, feeling gently all around the edges with his finger. He lifts it to his nose, almost expecting the smell of lilacs. It smells like paper and envelope gum.

With trembling fingers he tears it carefully and pulls out a shiny silver card with a huge number 15 on the front, reflecting off the dull glow of the six a.m street lamps. He opens it. It's from Lorna.

Nana's card is a wonky chain-stitch effort which she must have done herself, even though she's never seemed to like Kili much. She says he's perpetually scruffy and cheeky and fidgety, although he never speaks to her if he can help it, and Thorin always drags a comb through his wild hair whenever they have to see her. Still, he props the lopsided card up on the mantelpiece and opens her present: a football shirt a million sizes too small. Later, when Thorin gets up out of bed, he dithers for ages over whether or not to chuck it.

“She does it on purpose, I'm sure, to spite us,” he says, even though Lorna once told him off for expressing negativity towards other family members in front of Kili. Then she had to apologise for showing negativity towards Thorin in front of Kili. It's a bit overwhelming being apologised to by adults, especially when Kili doesn't mind his uncle bad-mouthing Nana at all.

“She's just old,” says Kili with a shrug. “She hasn't seen me in ages.”

“Yes, well, thank God for that,” Thorin mutters, yawning as he pours out cereal. He used to wear proper pyjamas, but they shrank in the wash and now he wears this old university t-shirt, splattered with paint from where they decorated Kili's room an age ago. “Go on then, scruff, open the others. Let's see what you've got.”

Kili already knows what the other presents are. He asked Thorin specially for a brand new gear kit; it's the one in the big box in the middle of the kitchen table, too heavy for him to lift so he has to slide it. Thorin seemed a bit disappointed when Kili asked for it, like he was expecting him to ask for a pair of football boots or something. Kili rips off the paper and lifts up the heavy lid, running his fingers over all the dozens of shiny gears and keys and mechanisms, glistening. He picks up a tiny spiral spring and bounces it gently between thumb and forefinger, until it pings right out from his hand and lands in his cornflakes.

“Careful,” Thorin says, annoyed, because the kit wasn't cheap. He picks out the milky spring with a tut, tossing it on to the table.

Mr Baggins' present is neatly-wrapped. Inside the paper is a book, like always. It's heavy, with lots of pages and a vast forest painted on the front cover. Kili looks at the title. _The Adventures of Robin Hood_.

He turns it over in his hands, as though it might morph into something else.

“Oh, look at that,” says Thorin, lifting it up to see for himself. It's a huge book, hardback, and old-fashioned enough to have _colour palettes_. Thorin smooths each one out carefully, admiring them. “That was very kind of him, it must have been expensive. Make sure you thank him properly.”

“Mm,” says Kili, not feeling particularly thankful. It's mean to think so, but it's such a babyish present. He's fifteen! Still, he can hardly say that, can he? Maybe he'll thank Mr Baggins and then give the book to Ori. He likes this sort of weirdo old stuff.

When Kili looks up the table is empty bar his tool kit. Thorin is chucking away bits of wrapping paper, a triangle of toast between his teeth. Kili's eyes search and search, but there's nothing else. Not that there _normally_ is, just...

Thorin catches him looking, but he doesn't seem annoyed.

“Ah,” he says, smiling, “you've figured it out, have you?”

“Figured what out?” says Kili, but he thinks he already knows. Excitement bubbles in his belly as he watches his uncle carefully, checking to see if he's hiding anything behind his back. All he's holding is his toast, but maybe it's small... something that could fit in his pocket?

“There might be something else,” Thorin says knowingly.

“Really?” says Kili, and he grins. “What is it? Can I open it now?”

“Later. Finish your breakfast.” Thorin steps on the pedal of the bin and tosses the too-small football shirt into it.

–

Stand tall. Shoulders back. Relax.

 _Snap_.

Hook. Relax.

Draw. Teeth together. Aim.

Aim.

4... 3... 2...

 _Go_.

“Ah! That one was excellent,” says Thorin, nodding as he tries to pretend he isn't numb with cold.

“Didn't even hit a colour,” says Kili. The arrow is frozen into one black ring, a measly four.

“Well. You still hit the board. More than I could do,” says Thorin. “Have another go. One more and then we'll get going.”

Kili draws another arrow, sets up and aims, red fingers straining with effort. He stares hard at his target. This one's even worse: he hits a two.

“You're just out of practice,” Thorin says later on, when they're warming up in the café. He keeps his hands wrapped tight round his black coffee, not actually drinking it.

“I used to get nines, tens no problem.”

“Well like I say, out of practice, aren't you? Maybe we could start visiting the range more often.” But they can't afford to do this and they both know it.

“I wish we still had a garden,” says Kili, loading cream from his hot chocolate on to his spoon and letting it drop back on to the snowy hill again.

“Don't play with it, just drink it. And that was never really our garden to begin with, Mr Baggins was just kind enough to let you demolish his flower pots.”

“Maybe I could start using Fili as target practice.”

“Absolutely not.” Thorin smiles at him though, indulging him. He has to, after all, it's his birthday. Kili tries to see if he can push a bit more.

“Uncle?”

“Mm?”

“Erm... Uncle...”

“What?”

“D'you think...”

“Do I think..?”

“Now I'm fifteen, I mean. Do you think things will be... well, different? Sort of?”

“Different how?”

“With Fili. And Lorna, and... I mean, do you think I'll get told more? I'm older now.”

“More about what?”

“About... Dís.” Kili hesitates. “My mum.”

Thorin winces, and he tries to hide it behind a long sip of coffee. He takes a deep breath, clears his throat. When he puts his mug down he doesn't take his hands off it, like they're frozen to the porcelain.

“Well, Kili...”

“It's just that Fili has meetings on his own sometimes,” Kili interrupts. Now he's asked the question he isn't sure he wants to hear the answer.

“Fili is sixteen,” says Thorin gently. “Things change when you reach sixteen.”

“So he's been here for the earth to go round the sun one more time than I have and he gets special meetings?”

“And he's lived with your mother a lot longer than you have.”

Kili huffs. “It isn't fair.”

“I know.”

“No, you don't!”

“Don't start, Kili...”

“I'm not! I just... it's just...” He curls his fingers into fists, feeling himself cloud over. Thorin is speaking but Kili can barely hear him. He feels so disappointed. He felt sure things might change now. It's his file. His life. His mother, family, blood. He doesn't even know her address. He wrote to her once, a long time ago, a postcard with wonky crayon writing and a lopsided stamp. He can't remember what he wrote. Stupid stuff, probably, about his favourite toys and bugs he'd found in the garden. His social worker sent it specially for him, but he never got a reply. He hasn't tried since.

Kili hasn't touched his drink but Thorin suggests they go. He says it gently, nicely almost, but it's obvious he thinks Kili will make a scene if they don't get out now. It isn't difficult to persuade Kili though; Thorin says they'll go and get his other present now.

But when they get on the bus, they go into town, not home. They get off at the stop a block away from the jewellery shop.

“Do you have some errand to run before we go home?” Kili asks doubtfully.

“No. I told you, we're getting you your surprise.”

They go inside. Dwalin looks after Arkenstone on Saturdays, but there isn't much to look after today. There are no customers. He's sitting behind the counter looking grumpy and bored with a big catalogue in front of him. He nods to Thorin when they go in the shop, but says nothing. He barely ever speaks.

“Stay here,” Thorin says to Kili, and he goes off into the store room before Kili can protest. He glances nervously at Dwalin.

“Hi,” he says stupidly.

Dwalin looks at him, then nods. “'Lo. Birthday, is it?”

Kili nods.

“How old?”

“Fifteen.”

Dwalin grunts something. “Fifteen, eh? I remember when you were six years old runnin' and hollerin' round these aisles.”

The words themselves are the making of a fond anecdote, but Dwalin doesn't sound very fond when he says it. Kili titters nervously, unsure whether or not it's supposed to be funny. Luckily Thorin doesn't take long. When he comes back out he's holding a box, smiling. Kili doesn't understand why his present would be here, but all the same he can _feel_ himself light up when he sees the box. Thorin hands it over.

It feels quite heavy for a little box. He picks at the tiny stripe of tape and lifts off the lid. There's a velvet cushion inside, and on it a large silver watch with a shiny black face.

“Do you like it? I had it made specially for you. Bilbo helped. He thought you'd like that design.”

Kili swallows, staring at it. He lifts the watch out of the box and holds it in his palm. The metal is cool and heavy, and when he looks at it up close he can hear it ticking.

“What's wrong?” says Thorin, sounding uncertain. “Don't you like it?”

“I do, it's just...” He takes a deep breath, running his hand over the smooth face of the watch. “I thought it might be... something else.”

“Something else?” Thorin looks confused. “What did you think it would be? We're here at the shop.”

“I know.” And he does know, of course. Has known since this morning that it would be something like this, but pushed it to the back of his mind, refused to consider it.

“Kili?”

“I thought it might be something from her.”

Thorin stares at him. For a moment he looks like he might sympathise. Then his face hardens.

“For Christ's sake, Kili, don't be so ridiculous.”

“Why is it ridiculous?”

“Well, where would you get an idea like that from? Why _this_ year?”

“I'm sorry.”

Thorin shakes his head. “Look, if you don't want the watch –”

“No no, I do, I really like it. Look...” Kili scrambles to get the thing on his wrist, and in his haste tries to slip it over his hand but it won't go. Thorin sighs and yanks it from him, undoes the clasp and attaches it to Kili's wrist himself. It's a perfect fit.

“I'm sorry,” Kili says again, twisting the watch. It feels alien there, cold and heavy. “Thank you.”

“Don't lose that one,” says Thorin. That's all he says. Then they go home.

–

Home is where the shouting starts.

Not straight away. It takes time. Kili goes into his bedroom and tries to take the watch off, but the clasp is fiddly and his fingernails are too blunt to undo it. He flops back on to his bed in defeat, Fili on the other side of the room, not saying a word. From the room next door comes a bang.

Kili sits up, ears pricked, and even Fili goes still. Then Thorin's voice summons him from the next room, and automatically Kili stands up. Suddenly, Fili is beside him.

“He was calling me, not you,” he says, giving him a gentle shove back. Then he goes out of the room, leaving Kili behind.

It starts quiet and builds like boiling water. When Kili goes out on to the landing, it's Thorin who's shouting, not Fili. “I'm trying my best to trust you,” he's saying, “I'm trying my best and this is what you do?”

Kili doesn't understand what's happened. Fili was supposed to be helping Mr Baggins all day in the shop. Maybe he robbed the till? Kili hopes he hasn't attacked Mr Baggins with a trowel.

Thorin sees him standing there and turns on him instead.

“Get back to your room, Kili.”

“Why? What's going on?”

“Just do as I say.”

“He's mad because I took what _should_ be mine,” Fili explains in a strangely calm voice.

“What should be yours is given to you,” Thorin growls. He's red in the face, blazing. “How could you even think that this was acceptable behaviour? How could you even think that I would...” He trails off, wordless, propped against the door frame of his bedroom like he needs to hold himself up.

“What did you take?” Kili asks. “Money?”

“Kili!” The bark of his name is so fierce that Kili jumps in alarm and backs obediently into his room. He closes the door on the shouting, but it rings loud and clear through the wood.

He's never liked shouting, unless he's the one doing it. At the foster home he used to live in, people shouted all the time. Thorin thinks he shouldn't be able to remember, but he can. He wasn't a baby. He remembers crawling into the space under the stairs and closing the little door, hiding there until it went quiet. Sometimes it didn't go quiet for hours.

At tea time Fili doesn't join them. Mr Baggins comes up to the flat with a cake he's made himself, but once he's asked all the obligatory questions about presents and the archery range he and Thorin just start talking about boring stuff like bin collections and how terrible the council are, and once he's done with his cake Kili slouches off back to his bedroom.

Fili's in there, with that book he's always got his nose in. He doesn't bat an eyelid. Kili gets into bed without even bothering to undress, pulls the covers right up over his head. It's dark out, but too early to sleep. He squeezes his eyes shut all the same, flattening his hands against any gaps in the duvet, trying to make it completely dark, so tight he can hardly breathe.

“What are you doing under there, you freak?” says Fili.

Kili emerges anxiously.

“Did you steal our money?” he asks, when it's clear Fili isn't going to speak.

“That's one word for it,” Fili grunts, turning a page in his book. “A pittance, I'd call it. And anyway, I didn't _steal_ anything. I don't steal. I was going to give it back.”

“When?”

“Can't you just shut up?” says Fili. Then he sighs. “When I get to London.”

“London?”

“I'm going home.”

Kili hesitates. He doesn't bother explaining that this is where Fili lives now. He knows what Fili will say.

“How are you going to do that?” he asks instead.

“Do you know everything you've said so far has been a question? Do you ever stop?”

So Kili stops. But Fili carries on.

“I'm not sticking around here any longer than I have to. As soon I've got the money I'm gone. And like I said, it was only meant to be a borrow. I was gonna send the money straight back, as soon as I got home. Mum would have given it to me, I know she would.”

“Mum?”

Fili looks up at him sharply, but as soon as he does his expression softens slightly, not kindly, but curiously. Thoughtfully.

“You could come, you know,” he says slowly, like he's still working it out in his brain.

“Me?” Kili blinks, alarmed. He finds himself backing away on his bed, as though the very thought is terrifying. “You hate me.”

“You've got a new watch,” Fili points out. “And anyway, I don't. Hate you, that is. We're family, you don't hate family. Course, doesn't mean you aren't an idiot who never knows when to shut his gob, but still...”

“You want me to go with you?”

Fili is quiet for a long time. So long in fact that Kili gives up hope of him ever answering. But he does, gently, tiredly, like he's giving up something he wants to keep.

“She talks about you all the time.” He looks down, starts chipping at his thumbnail. “Sometimes it's like she still thinks you're there, that you've just gone on holiday.”

Kili wavers. “She doesn't even write.”

“It's not that simple.”

“Bollocks.”

“Think whatever you want,” Fili shrugs, turning back to his book.

“ _Why_ doesn't she write?”

“That's all you want? A letter? I could _take_ you to her. All you have to do is sell your watch and we could be there next week.”

Kili imagines this. It's vivid in his mind already, because he's thought about it so many times. Sometimes the place changes – occasionally they're in their old flat, other times a brand new house – and sometimes Fili is there and sometimes he isn't, but she never changes. She's soft and warm, and smells like flowery perfume, like violets in the shop downstairs, and she smiles and hugs him, says how much she's missed him, oh she's missed him...

“It'll never work. They'll just come after us and send us back again. And anyway...”

“What?” says Fili.

“What about Uncle?”

“What about him?”

“Can't just leave him.”

“I can, pal. You don't have to come. No one's forcing you.”

But Kili wants to, even if they get sent straight back again. Just to see her, once. And London, holding the moon on the top of a clock, like he's seen in pictures.

When he crawls into bed that night, Fili doesn't bring it up again. He falls asleep quickly, but Kili tosses and turns all night, unable to get comfortable, unable to switch off his mind. He isn't sure if Fili meant it, if he was just winding him up. Should he tell Thorin? Though that wouldn't make any difference. They can't keep Fili prisoner. They can't always watch him.

Fili is snoring softly across the room now, tucked up under his special blanket, the only thing he's properly unpacked. The pattern is wonky on it, but it looks warm. It must be handmade. The thought makes Kili ache, and he turns over and pulls his knees to his chest, his eyes shut tight, like he can kid himself his blanket is specially handmade too.

He doesn't know what to do. Everything feels dreamlike, not a nightmare but a long, drawn-out surreality. It's been like this for weeks, ever since Fili arrived. Nothing's ever still; things won't stop changing. But then, Kili's used to that.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: References to physical violence (though no actual descriptions) and child neglect.

Invisible fingers clench the brittle bones of his hand together; the pain lurches blindly from each finger, throwing itself from knuckle to wrist to throbbing elbow, squeezing and pulling in turn. Kili struggles to heave himself upright, and in the dusty winter-dark examines the damage. His fingers tremble, as though in a vain attempt at shedding from themselves their bloodied purple skin, dead skin.

Everybody's gone home now. When he stands, shaking, he lifts his bag with his good hand – his better hand – and begins the crawl back down the corridor. His mouth, hot with salty blood, spits at a Happy School poster; blood lands wetly on Sowter Hill's crest, black in the dark, dribbling down like a weeping stab wound.

It's icy outside, and his unsteady feet slip slightly, his body threatening to topple over altogether. The playground's deserted, it's dark out, but he can see Fili's dot of a figure waiting for him at the bus stop. He's started doing that recently. Not out of kindness. He was always supposed to wait there ever since he came to live with them. It's just that now, he's actually started doing it.

Kili limps over. He can see his own breath, chalk white before him, with every harsh exhale. It hurts to breathe, like when they have to do cross country running in the winter and Kili's mouth turns to blood.

He reaches Fili at the bus stop and collapses against him, the weather stinging his eyes. No, tears stinging his eyes, but he won't cry. He presses his lips together, staring hard at the white ground, like the ice might freeze any humiliation threatening to trickle down his cheeks.

Fili cuts his respite short and takes Kili by the shoulders, peering into his face, frowning, angry... no - something else.

“What happened?” he asks.

“Nothing.”

Fili shakes him. “What happened?”

“I did what you told me to,” says Kili. His voice wobbles, but he won't cry. “Nothing.”

“Oh God. Oh Christ.”

Kili holds up his trembling hand.

“Is it broken?” he asks, trying to creak the shaking fingers forward.

“I don't know.”

So he does, then. He starts to cry.

–

It's Fili who cleans him up. He makes Kili sit on the edge of the bath and carefully picks out little stones from his mottled skin, dislodged from the bottoms of shoes, then dabs at him with the special alcohol-free wipes Thorin gets so it doesn't sting. He doesn't say anything while he's focusing on the gobbets of blood beneath Kili's left eye, his leaking nose or the bruises on his arms (and chest, once Kili stops fidgeting and finally unbuttons his school shirt), but then he picks up Kili's hand very gently and begins pressing at it with his thumbs, and it hurts but Kili doesn't pull away.

“It's not broken,” says Fili, “just really badly bruised.”

“How do you know?”

Fili doesn't answer. He finds the last bandage in the medicine cabinet and very efficiently starts to dress Kili's poor hand, neatly but firmly, so it doesn't come loose, then lets go.

“There. That alright? Not gonna start crying again, are you?”

“I never cry!”

“'Cos I'll have to use this if you do.”

Fili holds up the bloodstained wipe and Kili manages a tiny snort.

“Put on your red jumper, the sleeves'll cover the bandage,” says Fili, once they're back in the bedroom. He picks it up off the end of Kili's bed. For one bizarre moment Kili thinks he's going to put it on for him, but Fili just chucks it.

“Why cover it up?” asks Kili, pulling the jumper over his head.

“Do you want Thorin to know? Or the bloke downstairs? What about Lorna? What's she going to think if she sees bandages all over your hands?”

“Dunno. That I fell over?”

“Christ, you're dim. You think this place is bad, you'll hate it even more in a proper kids' home.”

“I've been in a kids' home.”

“No, you haven't.”

“I have. I can remember.”

“When?”

Kili doesn't answer, because he knows Fili will only tell him that he couldn't possibly remember it, just like Thorin always does. But Kili can. He can remember having his sixth birthday in the foster home. The cake was flourless and sugarless and tasted like chunky dry dirt, and he fed his share to the big Alsation who lived in the house. His foster mother – the name of whom, admittedly, does escape him – was a short-term sort. He can't remember why he was taken there, but he suspects it was money. Thorin never had much to begin with, bar what social services gave him, but when he got Kili back after a few long months, he'd finally inherited the jewellery shop from his own father. Suddenly food was on the table again, and Kili was back in his own small bed. He was grateful. He slept and slept, to make up for months of nightmares. The kids in the home were awful; maybe that's why Kili can recall the experience so vividly. He shared a room with an older boy who tried to drown him once when they went to the swimming baths.

“They never told me you were in a home,” says Fili. He sounds almost confused, a stark change from the usual flat tone.

“So... you been in one then?”

Fili shrugs, then nods, like he's somehow ashamed. “Rancid places,” he says, sitting down on Kili's bed. “Though I s'pose it's not the fault of the people who run them. What can you expect in a building full of unwanted kids? It's not going to be paradise.”

“They're not all unwanted.”

“No, some are orphans.” He looks up at Kili. “We're not.”

“Do you know where he is then? Our dad?”

Fili scoffs, then swears. “Don't call him that. He was gone before you were born.”

“Why did he leave?”

“Because. That's what people do.”

“Not Mum, though.”

“No. Mothers don't leave.”

Kili wavers, then sits down next to Fili on the bed. It feels weird, like it belongs to Fili now. But then, Fili has a way of doing that, infiltrating.

“Are you really gonna go back to her? I mean really,” says Kili.

“Of course I am,” Fili snaps, like it's obvious. “She needs me, she can't cope on her own, she... well, they don't get that.”

Kili, who thinks this sounds rather melodramatic, says nothing.

“They do that,” Fili continues quietly. “They know nothing about you, but they take you away anyway.”

“They know everything about me, but they don't tell me anything,” says Kili.

Fili looks up, gently surprised. They haven't turned the big light on, and the glow of the lamp makes him look softer, less scary.

“What don't you know?” he asks.

Kili still isn't sure he likes his brother much, but he wants to tell him because nobody's ever asked. It all comes out in one big rush, rehearsed at night in bed for years.

“I don't know where Mum is. They always let me know me when she moved, but never the address, in case I tried to find her. I didn't even know the city sometimes. And I don't know where... he is either. Or his name. Or why they took me away and not you. I don't know what _I_ did wrong. I don't know why she doesn't pick up the phone or send me a bloody letter, a _birthday_ card. Does she even know when my birthday is? She must've done once, but now she's forgotten. Or she's just poor. Is she poor? God, she could've been dead and they wouldn't have told me. And as far as they were concerned, you didn't exist to me. They used to make me draw you, and her, and the flat, like that's all you were. Pictures. That _is_ all you were. I get that now. They thought I'd never see you or her again, so they tried to make me not care. That'll be it. It is, isn't it?”

“Do you? Care?”

“I don't know.”

“So they did work their magic on you,” Fili sneers, looking away. It's like he's disgusted, like Kili can help the fact that he doesn't love his mother.

“But I'd like to see her,” Kili says finally, after several long seconds of stony silence. “If only to see what she looks like.”

When Fili speaks his voice is soft, almost inaudible, and he keeps his eyes turned away. Reluctant. “I can show you her now, if you promise to still come with me.”

“Why do you need me to go?”

“Because _she_ needs you to.” He scoffs, bitterly. “You think she's forgotten you, don't you? You're such an idiot. Mothers don't forget their children, Kili, that's just sick.”

“Alright, you don't have to have a go at me!”

“I'm not having a go at you, but you just don't _get_ it.” Fili stands up, like standing up will emphasise everything he's trying to say. “She always talks about you. Always. All the things she remembers about you, what it'll be like when she... gets you back.”

Kili is startled by the word “when”. It's not a word he's ever connected with himself and his mother.

“Why doesn't she come for me, then?”

“It's not that easy. They won't let her –”

“Because she's a bad mother.”

“She is _not_ a bad mother!” Fili roars, and it's just as well Thorin isn't home yet because he would be in here quick as anything otherwise. “She's just... she can't cope sometimes. I _told_ you that. That's why she needs _me_. To help her out. That's why I can't be here, don't you see that?”

His face is twisted in a grimace of something like pain. Kili sits back, uncertain and bewildered.

“What's wrong with her, Fili?”

“There's nothing wrong. She just gets upset sometimes, that's all. But not always, not like they think. Usually she's great!” His face lights up in memory. “She always has these brilliant ideas, and we go to all these different places, and she writes amazing stories and she _paints_ , Kili, and... the flat we're in at the moment I think we really might get to keep this time. She's been so well recently. Not that she's sick. But I think... well, she says as soon you're home then everything will be right. That's what she says.”

Kili looks at him doubtfully. For the first time ever, Fili sounds like a child. He toes at the carpet with filthy, mud-caked shoes.

“I didn't believe her at first,” he continues. “It didn't seem fair, _you_ being the thing that would make everything fine again when you've been away for years. But it's what she wants.”

“Why doesn't she come to get me then?” Kili asks a second time.

“They won't let her near. And now they've shoved me here too. But we can get back.” Suddenly, as though struck by a brilliant idea, Fili straightens and marches over to his side of the room. He lifts his pillow and slips out the dog-eared journal, brandishing it like a trophy.

“I told you I could show you her,” he says, sitting back down on his own bed. He gestures Kili over.

This is unknown territory for Kili. At one point this corner of the room was empty, usually home to Kili's dirty laundry that he couldn't be bothered taking to the wash basket in the bathroom. But ever since Fili arrived it's been no-man's land. Tentatively, he creeps over, careful not to step on Fili's strewn-about clothes and books and pencils. He sits on the very edge of Fili's bed, patting the mattress on either side of him, as though checking for stuck-up pins.

Fili only turns back the cover of the book, revealing a pile of mismatched letters and photographs and scraps of paper full of illegible scratches of handwriting. There aren't many photos, and the ones Fili has have been taken on a throwaway camera, or something else from way back when, obvious by the awkward orange flashes and bad angles.

Fili fans out the meagre selection like playing cards and picks out one so crumpled and creased it's a wonder there's any image left.

“This is her,” he says.

She looks lovely in the picture. She smiles at the camera with big, uneven teeth, framed by orange lips to match the tangerine tie-dye dress she wears, flared at the skirt and sleeves like she's ready for a 60s-themed fancy dress party. She has a lot of wild brown hair, scruffy and falling long past her shoulders, and rings all over her fingers, and bangles jangling along her wrists. She stands with her hands on her hips, almost taking up the whole frame, her wide face glowing from the flash of the camera.

Kili wonders who took the picture. He can see in the background something on the floor, square and red with black bumps along the edge, wheels. A fire engine, perhaps? A London bus? Fili must have still been a child. The smoky, out-dated décor of the room says this even if the toy truck doesn't.

He's never been sure if all this time he's been afraid of feeling nothing, or feeling too much upon seeing her. But now it's neither, because she is not a surprise. She is the wild hair and laughing mouth of his earliest, blurred memories. It's like meeting with someone after a very long time apart.

Fili seems to have decided his showing the picture has been a bit of a mistake; Kili can see his fingers curling against his legs, itching to get the photograph back, as if it will start to disappear the longer Kili looks at it. Reluctantly, Kili gives it back and is rewarded with a different one: he and Fili, just babies (and yet Kili still has a mop of scruffy dark curls falling into his eyes, which are big and brown and laughing, to match a gummy, drooling smile). They're sitting in a box advertising a Hitachi television. In the background is a Christmas tree. Kili is waving a polystyrene block in his fat fist. Fili, beside him, is the picture of mischief. He has a red dummy in his mouth, but it's still obvious he's grinning, chubby fingers clutching the edges of the box as he peeks impishly at the camera. It's like they've got a secret, or that they've barricaded themselves inside an impenetrable fort, this mighty cardboard box.

If somebody had merely described the photo to Kili, rather than show it to him, he'd have said he could never imagine Fili as anything but the aggressive teenager who lives in his bedroom. But if the picture of Dís didn't come as a surprise to Kili, this picture does. They look nothing alike, yet cooing adults would still say they were definitely brothers.

“I was ugly,” says Kili. Is that the reason only he was taken to Thorin? Because he was the ugly one?

“All babies are.” Fili takes the photo and tucks it safely back into his book. There's another picture left, but Fili doesn't show it to him.

“Who took the photos?”

“Oh, I don't know. Different people,” Fili says vaguely. “Blokes she was with at the time. Or Uncle Frerin.”

Frerin is Uncle Thorin's younger brother. Kili doesn't remember much about him, but he's dead now anyway. He was a soldier. Kili only remembers the funeral. Not that he was allowed to go. He had to go and spend the day with Mr Baggins, and Thorin barely spoke for a whole week.

Kili's more curious about the men in his mother's life, but he doesn't know how to ask about them. Did they stay for long? Lorna said Fili had a stepfather. That he and Dís were engaged.

“Was she really going to get married?” he asks, after a while. He doesn't look at Fili, afraid he's going to turn mean. But he doesn't. He stays quiet for a long time.

“It wasn't really official,” he says eventually, closing up the book and slipping it safely back under his pillow. “Just something they talked about. He was going to get her a ring.”

“Well nobody bloody well told me.”

Fili nods at him. “They would've. Mum had this whole plan that it would fix everything, and they'd let you come home. But...”

“He left,” Kili supplies, trying to hurry the story along. He doesn't know how much longer he can hear about Dís wanting him to come home to her. It makes him hurt, right in the pit of his belly.

“He didn't leave, Kili. He's dead.”

“Why?”

“You know. He topped himself.”

“Why?”

“I don't bloody know why, probably because he was _sad_.”

Kili shifts away. He wants to go back to his own bed. He knows, of course, what suicide is, but he's never thought of it in relation to anyone he knows. Not that he ever knew his stepdad-to-be. The news of his death comes as painlessly as tragic newspaper headlines. It hurts somebody, but not him.

It hurts Fili.

“I'm sorry he's dead,” says Kili, because he should.

Fili nods, even manages the tiniest hint of a smile. He looks down.

“How's the hand?”

Kili can't pretend their discussion has made him forget about the hand; it throbs through its bandage, and promises a restless night.

“Not too bad.” He flexes his fingers slowly and every muscle twinges in protest.

“Those bastards deserve to rot,” says Fili. Then slowly, very awkwardly, he puts his arm around Kili's shoulders, giving him a loose pat. It isn't a desire to give affection, Kili knows, it's an apology, substituting words that'll only make them embarrassed. The weight of his arm feels foreign. What is Fili made of? Metal bones and wooden insides.

He looks down at Kili's good wrist.

“They didn't nick your watch, then,” he observes. He can't keep the relief out of his voice, and in a twist of anger Kili pulls away and stands up.

“I don't want to sell it, Fili.”

“Why not? I thought you wanted to go home.”

“I never gave you an answer,” says Kili, backing away, “and you don't need to call it that. It's not my home. It's yours. You just need the money to get there.” He suddenly feels ridiculous. His face burns. “That's the only reason you're being nice. Showing me pictures and... you just want me to sell my watch for you.” He cradles it protectively, the metal heavy on his sore hand.

“You can think what you want,” Fili says evenly, “but I'm going whether you help me or not. I just wanted to give you the opportunity to see her again. She wants you to come home, I've told you that.”

“Then she should come and get me! No – she should never have got rid of me in the first place!”

“She didn't get rid of you. You were taken away.”

“Then why weren't you?!”

“I was!” Fili stands, suddenly, and Kili's knees hit the end of his own bed. “I was in and out of homes all the time. You were lucky, you got to come here and stay here. But that was because she couldn't cope with you.” He sighs, and laughs, and shakes his head all at once. “You cried _all_ the time. You were always sick, you yelled yourself hoarse every night in your cot till half the flat block came round banging on the front door. How could you not remember?”

“I was a baby!”

“Bigger than a baby. She only kept you in that cot so you couldn't get out at night. The amount of times she found you'd crawled down three flights of stairs and sat yourself in some lift or corner of the tower block, either bawling or whining or laughing away like a little bugger. You drove her mental.”

“Fine, she hated me.”

“She _loved_ you. She adored you! _I_ was the one who hated you. You messed everything up! They'd never have come if it weren't for you. She didn't give you up, they took you away because they said she couldn't cope. They said she was a _bad mother_. They didn't see what it was like when you were good.”

“She left us at home on our own, Fili. I know she did. I remember it.” Clutching the bars of a crib he was too old for, screaming for her to come back.

“It was hard on her,” says Fili.

“It was hard on her.” Kili laughs, though it isn't at all funny. “That makes it alright then. Do you want me to apologise for crying when I was little?”

“Don't be stupid.”

“Yeah, that's all I ever am, isn't it? The little kid too stupid to be told anything about his own life except that he was so awful and ugly and bad that nobody would look after him. Well that's fine. I don't want her to look after me. I hate her!”

Fili comes forward. Kili puts his hands to his face, thinking he's going to get hit. Fingers grip his shoulders. Fili is steadying him.

“Then tell her that yourself,” he says.

In the hallway, the front door opens and closes, telling them Thorin has come home. Fili backs off, calmly. It's like he already knows he's won.


	9. Chapter 9

So they go, but not immediately. Even with the money Fili's got saved up from before he came to live at the flat, he still doesn't have enough for the both of them. It isn't for a few weeks, until February half term, that Fili tells Kili he'll have to sell the watch.

“It's the only way,” he says. “We don't even have enough for the train yet. Thorin's so stingy with allowance.”

This isn't really fair. Thorin gives as much as he can, but the trouble is he doesn't have much to begin with. Kili's been saving up his pocket money ever since the day he decided to go with Fili, bypassing Bofur's corner shop on the way home from school and going without new parts for his clockwork animals. It's not enough. Not unless they want to wait until next Christmas to find their mother.

He hasn't worn the watch once since either, so that it won't be suspicious when it's gone. At first Thorin would look at Kili's wrist to see if it was there, but he seems to have given up now. It makes Kili feel guilty. It's not that he doesn't like it after all. He tries to explain, once, that he isn't wearing it because he doesn't want it to get broken, but Thorin shrugs off the explanation.

“You can wear what you want. Though I do wish you'd stop slouching around in that bloody awful jumper.”

His hand has mostly healed now, but Kili still wears the red jumper like a second skin, as though for luck, or at least to avoid bad luck. He becomes suddenly worried that if he takes it off he and Fili will fail their mission altogether. He even stuffed it into his bag before going to school, but now it's half term he can wear it all week long. Fili seems to like the red jumper too; it's very easy to tug Kili around when he's wearing it. So on that first rainy Monday morning, Fili tugs Kili by the collar into their bedroom on his way to the lounge. That's when he explains about the watch.

“Can't we sell something else?” says Kili, eyes darting desperately around the room. “Some... furniture or something.”

“Yeah, your bed.” Fili rolls his eyes. “Give over, Kili, that watch is the only thing in this entire flat worth anything.”

“That's not true.”

“Yeah, alright, love is worth a thousand diamond rings. Now come on, where is it?”

Kili wavers. “Don't look.”

Fili sighs. His eyebrows rise, and he folds his arms.

“I mean it,” says Kili. “Don't look.”

When Fili has turned his back on him, Kili darts over to the wardrobe and on his side discreetly slides out his little wooden box, opening the lid. The watch is buried beneath everything else, safe and sound in its velvet case. He whips it out and pushes the box back into its hidden nook, where no one else can get to it.

“It's a nice watch,” Fili admits when he opens the case. “I remember the shop. We used to come and stay with Thorin in the holidays sometimes, do you remember? You probably don't. We sat behind the counter. And there was that bloke, that big bloke with the tattoos –”

“Dwalin?”

“That's the one. Used to shout at us for breathing.”

“He's not so bad. I mean, he's Uncle's oldest friend. He's still there, actually, at the shop.”

“Is he?” says Fili, but it's clear he's not listening anymore. His eyes have grown dark and greedy. “How much d'you reckon we can fetch for this?”

“I don't know, maybe... maybe not much.”

“It's stainless steel, and you've barely worn it. Maybe you could go back to the shop, see how much it cost.”

Kili takes a deep breath, and shakes his head. “There isn't any other, it was specially made. For me.”

“One of a kind, even better. Though I don't want us to get ripped off. I bet it did cost quite a bit, you know. Guilt's expensive.”

“Guilt?”

“For making you live with me.”

“It was for my birthday.”

Fili ignores this. He looks at the watch for a moment longer, then hands it back. Kili cradles it protectively.

“Where would I sell it anyway?” he asks.

“I don't know. A jewellery shop, I suppose.”

“I don't think they take your old stuff off you just like that, Fili. They have their own.”

“Well, we'll find somewhere. A proper dealer or something.” Fili pauses. “I suppose you could always pawn it.”

“What?”

“You know, a pawn shop. Mum used to do it all the time with her jewellery. You can loan your watch to them and then, maybe, get it back later on. I bet she'd give you the money.”

Kili thinks about it. He isn't really sure he likes the idea of getting the watch back after giving it away. It would only be a reminder of his betrayal, of what an awful nephew he is. But he doesn't fancy the idea of selling it either, of seeing his own special watch in the window of someone else's shop.

“There's a pawn shop in town, I remember seeing it that first day of school. You can go there, it'll be really easy. Just make sure you don't let him mess you around.”

“Me?” says Kili. “Why can't you do it?”

“It's your watch.”

“I don't even want to get rid of it.”

“But you want to see Mum, don't you? Anyway, it'll look dodgy if we both go, like we've stolen it or something. Just go and give him some sob story about how you're trying to make money for your ill mother.”

“I don't want to lie!”

“Well, you don't have to completely. You can say it was made specially for you by your uncle and you don't want to give it up but you have to. That'll make them feel even more sorry for you, you might get more cash that way.”

He says it so casually, like it's nothing. Then again, Fili has probably done this kind of thing a thousand times before.

Kili agrees to do it the next day. He has a mostly sleepless night, but when he dreams he has bizarre hallucinations of himself running down path after winding, rocky path. He's late for something, he doesn't know what, but every time he thinks he's arrived at the right place the path disappears into crumbling black nothingness, and he has to turn and go back, and stumble and trip, and at times he's stuck completely, unable to lift his feet, like an invisible force in the rocks is holding him there. And there's something in his pocket, weighing him down; at first he thinks it's his watch, but when he reaches in all he pulls out is a dusty old rock, identical to the ones his feet are pounding against. He wakes again and again, but each time falls straight back into the dream, though the paths change or the object in his pocket transforms into something else. At one point he pulls out Blue, but he's dead in Kili's palm, preserved in cold stainless steel.

In the morning he's so jittery and restless that Mr Baggins starts to look concerned. Kili has the watch stuffed in his pocket already, the heavy weight reassuring him that it's still there. He's supposed to be helping out in the shop, but eventually Mr Baggins gets so fed up of him spilling soil and knocking over plant pots that he gives him the stale end of a loaf of bread and sends him out to find some ducks to feed, as though that's something teenagers like to do.

Kili goes to Buckland Park first, but there's no ducks in the centre near the band stand even though the ice on the lake finally melted some weeks ago. But that's no surprise; instead Kili ducks into the surrounding woodland and follows the rushing stream as it melts from fairy green to murky brown the deeper into the woods he goes. It's a trail he usually only takes in summer, but in the winter it's more peaceful with no one else around. After losing the stream for a while he eventually picks it up again when it sprouts into a deep, brown pond, alive only with ducks, streaming across the water, undisturbed by the surrounding frosty dead land.

Kili begins to chuck the old bread. It's hard as a rock and difficult to break. Mr Baggins makes it himself, and it's usually pretty hard to begin with. Soon the ducks figure out the source of their feast, and the shallow edges of the pond make it easy for them to jump from the water and make a beeline for him, surrounding his feet and literally pushing and pulling at one another in their haste. He notices two locking necks, a drake surrendering to a rather vicious female opponent. The drake gets free and limps away, and Kili sees he only has one foot. The other hasn't been torn off; it's shrivelled and stubby, like a deformity. The drake has always been this way, but the others pick on him anyway.

Kili wades through the ducks, doing his best to shoo most of them back into the pond, and makes after the hobbling drake, dropping chunks of bread in front of him, shielding him from the other greedy beggars, letting him eat. The drake beaks at the bread gratefully. Kili smiles, though in reality the duck is just a duck, not really Kili's friend, incapable of thinking of anything other than food, like his brothers and sisters.

The others soon catch on and come running and, overwhelmed, the limping drake hobbles away, quivering. Kili wants to pick him up and take him home, though he'd only get bitten for trying. Still, he follows the drake until it shuffles back into the water and swims slowly beneath the arch of an old bridge, out of sight. And Kili follows, having to take the long way round to reach the bridge's wall, stepping off the narrow path and on to piles of wet leaves caked into mud, all of it shadowed by spindly winter trees, untrimmed and uncared for, threatening to scratch Kili's face if he isn't careful.

The nearer he gets to the bridge on foot the softer the ground becomes, until he's practically sliding down the slope of the brown bank, steadying himself on the dusty wall of the bridge. The brown water laps threateningly at his feet as he reaches the very edge, and then he peers carefully into the black tunnel, looking for his drake. An immense beak looms from the shadows, followed by a winding neck, and splashes water with its huge wings. Kili yelps and falls forward, just managing to hold on to the edge of the tunnel before his feet slip out from underneath him and he goes toppling down into the shallow stream, landing with a hard thump, half in half out of the water, his cheek scraping against mud-caked rocks.

For a moment he stays completely still, stunned. Then he looks up blearily, and in the distance spots a heron skulking back down the tunnel, out into the light on the other side of the bridge.

His bones already ache, from a mixture of bruises and cold and water. He crawls on to his knees and wipes his blood and mud strewn hands on the sides of his trousers. That's when he feels it. The jab of something sharp in his pocket. He reaches inside and pulls out a clutch of tiny glass and metal pieces. The stainless steel strap, though scratched, remains intact, but has come loose and now exists on its own. The face of Kili's watch is smashed. The ducks swarm at the edge of the water, quacking loudly all at once. It sounds like they're laughing at him.

–

He dashes into Bofur's shop on the way home.

“Is there any way you can fix this?” he asks, sliding the bits of watch on to the counter. There are more tiny jags of glass in the corner of his pocket, but they're too fiddly to lift out.

“Not me, lad. Clockwork mice perhaps, but I'm no watchmaker.” Bofur glances at the pieces doubtfully. “You'll have to take it into town and have it looked at.”

Kili hasn't the money to do that. The watch _was_ his money. He makes his slow way back home, wondering whose wrath he fears most, Fili's or Thorin's. Mr Baggins has customers in the shop, so Kili can slip up to the flat unnoticed. Thorin, on the other hand, is making his presence very known.

“He's angry about something,” Fili explains within the safe walls of their bedroom. The kitchen cabinets bang open and shut, and then the lounge door bangs shut, and then Thorin's bedroom door bangs shut. “God knows what. So, did you do it? You were quick.”

“Fili...”

“How much did he give you?”

“I still have the watch.”

Fili looks confused for a moment, before his face lights in understanding. “He tried ripping you off, didn't he? How much? Well, it's good you didn't settle, I guess. We can try somewhere else, there must be loads of places.”

“No, Fili, we can't.”

“What? Why not? Oh, don't tell me you bottled it.”

“Nothing like that,” says Kili, oddly glad it's the truth. But it's like he's swallowed glue and the words are stuck in his throat, because in the end he can't say it. He digs into his pocket and pulls out the broken watch, holding it in the palm of his hand. Fili stares.

“Oh, no,” he says hollowly, as though it's simply begun to rain. Then it seems to sink in. “Oh God, it's wrecked.”

“I didn't mean to,” Kili says quickly. “I was in the woods and I... I slipped. It was wet on the ground, near the stream, and there was all this mud, and... it was in my pocket. I was going to take it into town, I...”

Fili nods. Then he starts crying.

It's not proper crying. At first Kili doesn't even realise; Fili sits down on the edge of the bed and buries his face in his hands, and when he looks up he covers his nose and mouth with his fingers and breathes loudly in and out, and his eyes when he opens them are red.

“I'm really sorry,” Kili says, stunned. “Look, I could maybe get it fixed. I already asked Bofur, the corner shop man, but maybe Mr Baggins could help too, he's good with his hands...”

Fili isn't listening. Just sitting quietly. He isn't shouting, but Kili wonders if that would be better. At least he knows how to react when people are angry with him.

“There are other ways we could make money,” Kili tries tentatively.

“Like what?”

“We could work in the shop.”

Fili scoffs. “Yeah, then we'd be home in just under a decade.”

Kili stares, helpless. How could this happen? He was keeping the watch on him for _safekeeping,_ not to wreck it. Guilt welling in his belly, he realises his wish has come true; he didn't want to sell the watch. Now he can't. He looks around the room then dashes over to the wardrobe, wrenches the doors back, begins rifling through clothes and books and junk to find something else to sell. And not, he realises even now, out of some desperate desire to get to London quickly, but to right his reckless wrong.

There's nothing. Nothing of any worth. He searches in his night stand, under his bed, through the items crammed on the windowsill. He upends his elephant-shaped piggy bank, a present from Mr Baggins when Kili was seven years old and decided he was going to save up to go to Africa, and scatters three pound coins, a Welsh halfpenny and a lot of copper over his bed. He looks at Blue, at Fili, at the floor, focusing on a burn mark in the carpet so he doesn't have to think about anything else. Then he gets it. His bright idea.

“The shop,” he says.

“I told you,” says Fili, “it'd be a three-year Saturday job before we get anywhere –”

“Not working there.” Kili pauses. Dare he say it? He looks at Fili's downcast face and feels the irrepressible need to redeem himself. “The till. The money in the till.”

“Oh, you _are_ joking. Kili, I told you I wasn't a thief.”

“It's not stealing if you're going to give it back.” The words feel strange on Kili's tongue, like they're not really coming from him, but a ventriloquist, some hidden puppeteer. “Mr Baggins locks it up in his flat every night in a safe. But on Wednesday afternoons he goes to the village market. The money's still there in the till on the counter.”

“Because he trusts you,” Fili says flatly.

“Because I'm at school on Wednesday afternoons. But not during half term, right?”

Fili raises his eyebrows. For a moment, he even looks mildly impressed.

“What about Thorin?” he says. “He isn't going to the jewellery shop this week so he can stay here and make sure you and I don't start any fires.”

“He wouldn't go down into the shop if Mr Baggins wasn't about. But just to make sure, you can distract him. He'll be stunned if you so much as start a conversation with him, so it won't be hard.”

This is true, it won't be difficult at all. But as he says it, Kili can feel the tell-tale lump growing in his throat, awful guilt at the thought of tricking his uncle and stealing from a friend who trusts him. Then he sees the broken watch on the bed, and guilt at the thought of betrayal is washed over by anger at his own stupidity.

“You realise, though, that tomorrow is Wednesday,” says Fili. “That's the only day we can take this money, yeah? So it's the only day we can get the train to London.”

In fact, this thought hadn't occurred to Kili. Of course, if he takes the money, Mr Baggins will notice as he soon as he returns home from the market. Stealing from him means leaving the slimmest of windows for them to make their escape.

Kili takes a deep breath and nods. Maybe, after all, it's better this way. He won't have time to dwell on it and change his mind.

“Alright. Fine with me if it's fine with you.”

Finally, Fili smiles. “Of course it's fine with me. It's brilliant.”

–

At night, Kili doesn't sleep. Several long hours stretch by, and soon he's so overtired he'd welcome even the bad dreams. They don't come. Across the room, Fili sleeps easily, murmuring as he dreams. How can he be so peaceful, when they're on the brink of doing something so scary and wrong?

In the end he decides to wake Fili up. This is a mistake. When whispering his name doesn't work, Kili picks up a shoe from the floor and throws it at him. It only hits him on the back but Fili still stirs immediately, and he's grumpy when he wakes.

“Did you just throw a shoe at me?” he hisses, picking it up and lobbing it back. It hits Kili's night stand and sends his alarm clock flying to the floor with a clatter. “Go back to sleep.”

“I can't. I'm too nervous.”

“Look, there's only one thing to be nervous of right now and that's me if you don't let me sleep. So goodnight.” And to emphasise this, Fili pulls his blankets right up over his head.

Kili staggers up out of bed and out on to the landing instead. A strip of orange glows from under the lounge door, and he pushes it open. Thorin is sitting on the sofa with rolls of receipts surrounding him. Only he isn't doing anything with them, not even looking at them. He's just sitting there, resting the side of his head on his hand. He looks up when Kili comes in.

“Everything okay?” Thorin asks, whipping off his reading glasses.

“Just can't sleep.”

“Yes, I thought I heard something. You two aren't fighting, are you?”

“What? Oh, no. I just knocked the clock off my night stand.”

“I hope it didn't break. Bad luck to break a clock.”

Kili winces and quickly changes the subject. “What are you doing?”

“Oh, just...” Thorin flaps a few papers around uselessly. “Planning. Working.”

“At three in the morning?”

Thorin smiles tiredly up at him. “I suppose I can't sleep either.”

Kili wanders over and shifts a few long rolls of receipts off the sofa so he can sit down. Suddenly he wishes he could still curl up against Thorin's side for a cuddle, sent off to sleep by his uncle's soothing murmurs and the warm, familiar smell of his clothes. It's stupid to think about it; Kili knows he's too old now, but he doesn't want to be.

To his surprise, Thorin reaches out and wraps an arm around him, pulling him closer. He tuts at his hair, straightens out the collar of Kili's pyjama top, and smiles at him.

“My good lad,” he says. It's the last thing Kili wants to hear. He's _not_ good, he feels rotten to the core.

He lounges against his uncle's side for a good half hour or so, watching as the inky notes and lines on paper after paper begin steadily to blur, and his eyelids grow heavy and drift downwards, and finally he sleeps.


	10. Chapter 10

It's difficult trying to get used to the idea of not living in the flat any more. On Wednesday morning Kili gets up very early, when it isn't properly light yet, and wanders around each room quietly, trailing his fingers along the walls. He even peers into the bathroom, at the peeling yellow wallpaper behind the sink where a wobbly red 'K' has been crayoned.

There are smeary red stains on the skirting board in the kitchen from where he went a bit mad with his crayons too. This was before Thorin had the idea of giving him the old receipts to colour on. He'd sit him at the breakfast table on a pile of cushions so Kili could reach the surface properly, and tell him he could have all his crayons out at once and scribble as much as he liked, and it didn't matter at all if he got his hands dirty or broke the crayons in half by accident. This was back when Thorin didn't mind mess so much. Or at least expected it.

Kili has a peek in Thorin's room, but he's fast asleep, a vast lump in the covers, not so much snoring as growling like a big guard dog.

Fili himself is more Labrador. He's awake when Kili goes back in their bedroom, and it's quiet but Kili thinks he can hear Fili's thoughts buzzing. He's darting around the room, shoving things – mostly clothes that have been abandoned on the floor for the past month – haphazardly into his school bag.

“Pack light,” he says, as though Kili has a lot of stuff he wants to bring anyway.

He's never had many things. There's his clothes and his bow and arrows and a few books. He's got his little wooden box in the wardrobe. Then there's his tool kit, but he can't take that. It's far too heavy. He lifts the lid and snaffles a few gears and tiny tools and stuffs them in his pockets. Maybe Thorin will send the rest in the post, when he isn't angry any more.

Kili feels sick at the thought of that. He hasn't been able to sleep for it. What will Thorin think? What will he _say_? He'll be so angry, maybe even upset. He'll come looking for them. What if he finds them?

“Fili...”

No answer. Kili doesn't try again; he knows he's been heard, and he's just being ignored.

He finishes quietly packing, folding up his clothes and then sliding out his wooden box from the wardrobe and placing it carefully on top of the pile. He frets over Blue for a while. Fili suggests setting him free but Kili can't stand the thought. Blue's a domestic bird; he wouldn't know what to do or where to go. It'd be like in that film he saw a bit of one night when Thorin fell asleep in front of the television, where that old man had been in prison so long that when he got out he just went crazy and hanged himself because he didn't know how to live like a free man. He doesn't want Blue to hang himself because he doesn't know how to live like a free bird.

He'll just have to rely on Thorin to look after him. He'll be mad at Kili but that's no reason to be mad at poor Blue. It might be a good idea to leave a note with Bofur too, asking if he would be so kind as to provide some bird seed every now and then. Mr Baggins could easily pick it up on his way to get the paper in the morning. It's the perfect plan. But when Kili suggests this to Fili he's snapped at for his trouble.

“Leaving notes? What are you on about? There's no _time_ , Kili.” Fili shoves a t-shirt in his bag violently, perhaps to emphasise just how little time there is. “You need to keep an eye out for when Bilbo goes to the market. Go on, go look out the window.”

There's no point looking yet since Mr Baggins won't be going out until the afternoon, but Fili is so pent up that Kili does as he's told, just to keep him happy. He flits back to the window every half an hour or so until well after lunch, until the door to the shop downstairs finally opens and closes with a cheery jangle. Suddenly it's not like pretending any more: Kili has to face the reality that he is about to become a thief.

Fili's job is to keep Thorin distracted if necessary, but he hasn't emerged from his bedroom yet anyway, even though it's the afternoon. He does that sometimes. Kili doesn't think he's sleeping in there. Thorin's just the type of person who has rainy days, where he doesn't want to talk to you. It's never been a good thing until now. Well, perhaps good isn't the right word. But it's convenient. So Fili's left sitting alone in the living room, keeping guard, while Kili creeps barefoot to the downstairs flat.

It's weird when the flower shop's all empty like this. All the leaves and petals stand so still but alert, like puppets, as though they were chatting merrily away before and shut themselves up as soon as Kili walked in, so as not to give away their secret. He inches past them, trying hard not to touch a single one for fear of Mr Baggins noticing even the slightest change in his displays.

The till is sitting there on the counter, waiting for him. It's one of those bulky old mechanical ones, and all the big chunky buttons look like lots of eyes glaring at him, daring him to touch. Kili steps in front of it. He stands there for more than a minute, still. Then he whispers, “Hello?”

Nothing, of course, no Mr Baggins ready to pop out from behind a spider plant and catch him. Kili's breathing very quickly now, wondering what on earth to do next.

He doesn't know how to open the till. He didn't think about this.

There's a red button that says 'NS' and a blue one that says 'Print' and a yellow one that's been pressed so often the text has smeared right off it. Perhaps it said 'Open' once? He could try pressing it... but he doesn't want to risk it. What if it shuts the whole thing down, or alerts the shop to a burglar? Maybe that's why it's a blank button; it's just there to trick horrible thieves such as himself. He tries tapping the cash tray instead, and then considers physically destroying the thing altogether, getting all his weight behind it and pushing it off the counter. It's surely heavy enough to break. After all, once Mr Baggins is back, Kili and Fili will be long gone. But Kili can't stomach the idea of doing that to him. He isn't ready to be quite that bad yet.

He tries simply shaking the thing, seeing if he can _accidentally_ break it. Suddenly, as he's sliding his fingers beneath the till, he feels something cold and bumpy. When he presses harder against it the tray seems to loosen some. His heart kicks up a frantic beat as he realises it's a catch. Of _course_. It's the sort he's worked with dozens of times with his own toy-making. Practically every mechanical machine has a manual release catch, just in case something goes wrong with the machine itself. The one on the till is stiff, solid metal and very old, and he has to push his fingers painfully hard against it until it suddenly gives and snaps open, and the tray pops loose.

And here it all is: Tuesday's earnings and the dregs from this morning. He sifts his fingers around the penny compartments. There isn't much. It doesn't make Kili feel better, stealing less than he thought there would be. If the till was stuffed with money it wouldn't make him feel so guilty taking it. At least then there'd be some indication Mr Baggins could afford to be down a day's earnings.

But Kili holds his breath and takes it anyway, with quick, clumsy fingers, dropping copper and silver all over the floor and even losing a pound to the dusty space beneath the counter. He picks up every last coin he can until his pockets are bulging, and with trembling hands slams the tray closed.

-

He's only ever been on a train once in his life, to visit an aunt in the Yorkshire Dales. It wasn't a long journey, and the train station was lovely when they arrived, nothing but a tiny cottage-turned-ticket office dwarfed by huge green hills. Not at all like the hulking great cavern of a place they get on at. The station's so busy Kili can barely keep up with Fili, and people keep bashing him with their bags no matter how many times he says “excuse me” like you're supposed to.

He tells himself over and over it will be alright once they get on the train, but he's so scared. The queue for the ticket machines are a mile long, so Fili buys them tickets at the desk, having to count out the money they've stolen to the last penny while the man behind the glass looks at them suspiciously, drumming his fingers.

“Miserable bastard,” Fili mutters as he pulls Kili towards the turnstiles, tickets clutched firmly in his hands. He stops and stares at them, right there in the middle of the station. The answer to all of his problems. Kili can see the story unfolding in his head: they'll hop on the train and sleep away two hours and step out at the other end and there she'll be, standing on the platform, arms outstretched...

“Come on then,” says Fili, dragging Kili along again. They stagger to the platform, and even though Kili can see clearly that it's platform three they're heading for, Fili hangs on to his arm the whole time, and when the train does arrive he pulls Kili on with him and takes his bag off him and shoves it in the overhead compartment. “Go on, sit down.”

They don't talk at first. It's absolutely freezing, even though there are so many people in their carriage. Kili tries nestling a bit closer to Fili and strangely enough Fili doesn't seem to mind. Or notice at all really. He's chewing on his thumbnail, staring blankly at the seat in front of them. Kili nudges him but he doesn't respond.

“Fili?”

“I'm just thinking.” He takes his thumb away from his mouth. “Maybe we shouldn't have paid at the desk. D'you think there'll be a record or something?”

Kili shrugs helplessly. “I thought you had it all figured out.”

“Well I can't think about everything all the time, can I?” Fili snaps. “You might've thought to offer a bit more help.”

Kili doesn't think this is very fair. He nicked the money after all, _and_ he was the one who had to tell Thorin they were off to Buckland Park for the afternoon. It was so difficult to keep a straight face, to not crack and run up to him and give him a hug. Kili thinks about him now. Will he know they've run away? Probably not. They've only been out of the house for thirty minutes, though it feels like it's been hours.

They both relax once the train's stopped at Doncaster, then Newark. It starts to feel more permanent. Fili even falls asleep for a little bit, and Kili looks out the window at all the rushing hills and tiny little industrial towns as the sky very slowly begins to darken. He thinks about Blue. He thinks about Mr Baggins. He'll be home now. He'll know the money is gone, and the first thing he'll do is tell Thorin. “They said they were going to the park,” Thorin will say. Then his face will fall as he realises...

Kili shudders and turns away from the window, huddling instead into Fili's side. He doesn't sleep, but if he closes his eyes he can almost pretend the train is heading in the direction of their home, the flat and the flower shop. Is that what he wants, he wonders? The thought of seeing her, seeing his mother, isn't exciting as it should be. Perhaps because it doesn't feel real yet.

It doesn't feel real even when they finally reach their stop and Fili hauls their bags down, shepherding Kili out on to the platform, his chest to Kili's back so they don't get separated. It would be very, very easy to get separated. The station is huge, far vaster than any building Kili has ever been in. He grips the strap of his bag tightly and allows Fili to steer him out into the cold night air.

“They'll be looking for us,” Kili says, his breath dancing white in the air before him.

“I imagine they will,” says Fili. “But we'll be at Mum's soon, and then we'll be safe.”

Safe. Kili has never had to be safe _from_ Thorin.

He panics at first that Fili doesn't know where to go, but although London is vast it's split up into smaller, neater districts, and it soon becomes clear that Fili knows this part of Camden like the back of his hand.

Kili has heard about Camden. There's a big market and lots of colourful houses and people and a canal with barges and a bridge. But as they walk, Kili doesn't see any colour. And not because it's night time. They make their meek way through street after lamp-lit street, dodging taxis and great big gangs of loud people bustling along the pavements, until Fili pulls him down a long, narrow flight of stairs into the tube station. Kili's always wanted to go on the tube, but down here it's just like a big grey tunnel full of peeling posters and chewing gum and more people. He's starving hungry but Fili only has enough left for their tube tickets.

“Stop complaining, Kili,” he says impatiently. “Mum'll give you food, alright? Just be quiet now.”

So Kili shuts up. He shuts up the whole time they're standing on the platform, and he shuts up the whole sticky tube ride, and he doesn't even complain when they get off and Fili takes them on another painful excursion round these dank, mucky city streets, walking so fast he might as well be running.

But then Fili comes to an abrupt standstill, and Kili almost crashes into him. Then he looks up. Then he can't help but speak.

“Here? She – she lives _here_?”

They're standing in the entrance to a courtyard. Not a pretty, flower-laced courtyard like you see outside posh private flats. These flats are neither posh nor private, and the only plant life is the weeds gasping for air between the cracks in the cement. The building isn't tall like the tower blocks they've been passing, but it's got the same square balconies and frosted windows, the same disjointed grey brick holding it together. From a few windows Kili can see George Cross flags hanging limply. There are two trolleys outside and a patch of grass and a baby seat, the kind that goes in a car. Beside the front wall is a long row of big plastic bins, covered in graffiti.

It's called, ironically enough, Makehope House. It's nothing like the pictures of Camden Kili has seen. It could be a bombed-out part of South Africa. Perhaps they're not in Camden anymore. He doesn't know. He doesn't understand London, all these lines and tracks and carriages. He's suddenly terrified.

“Are we going in?” he asks quietly.

Fili looks at him and nods eagerly, already a step ahead.

It's worse inside. The walls are a dank grey-white, covered in amateurish graffiti, scrawled in marker pen or even carved in some places. Kili shudders to think what with. There's a long staircase, boarded with wood in place of banisters, and a lift that Fili doesn't even glance at as they walk past. In one corner is a black, ashy stain and the dried-up remnants of burned newspaper scattered at its feet.

She can't live here. How could anyone?

They make it up two flights of stairs before a gang of rowdy boys comes shooting along the corridor on bikes, so quickly Kili barely has time to blink before he's flattening himself against the wall, wincing as handlebars snag his stomach. The boys leave the two of them alone, thank God, more interested in seeing how many flights of stairs their bikes can make it down before they go head over handlebars, but it's a shock all the same, and it leaves Kili's heart pounding.

He's panting by the time they make it to the right floor, but the sight of the door is sobering. He stops dead in his tracks. She's behind it. She's _here_.

He looks at Fili. “Knock, then. Go on.”

Fili stares hard at the door. He wraps his fingers into a fist and knocks twice, loudly. Then he looks at Kili, and for the first time today smiles at him, a nervous, giddy grin.

The door doesn't open. Fili huffs out a laugh like he's been expecting it, and knocks again.

“Maybe she's asleep,” Kili suggests. He hasn't got his watch anymore, but the evening's getting on now. “Knock louder.”

“I _am_ knocking loudly,” says Fili, knocking particularly hard to prove his point. When there's still no answer he tries to open the door instead, holding down the handle and shouldering the wood. “It's always a bit stiff,” he explains, but his voice isn't very convincing, and after a few more shoulders against the door he gives up and simply bangs on the wood instead. “Mum! Mum, it's me!” He bangs louder. He's getting desperate now. “Kili's with me!”

Kili gives the door a hard shove of his own to make himself heard, but it's no use. This door doesn't open, but the one behind them does.

“What the hell is all this racket?” A woman steps out in a thin pink dressing gown, folding her arms across her chest. She's got a cigarette in her hand and it drips ash on to her dirty pink sleeve, already grey and tatty with muck. She's got a very thin face too, and she's frowning hard at both of them. “You!” she says, turning her heavily outlined eyes on to Fili. “Might've known it'd be you. Though we'd all hoped the social'd carted you off for good.”

Kili wonders who “we” are, and hopes there aren't a mass of identical thin ladies in dirty dressing gowns in the flat behind her. Her television set is blaring so loudly in there it's a wonder she heard Fili in the first place.

It's obvious they know each other, but miraculously Fili stays calm.

“Do you know where my mum went?”

The woman taps her ash. It falls on her patterned carpet. “Course I bloody don't. Packed up and left day after you went. Wouldn't tell me, would she?” She sniffs, ruefully. “Still, hardly matters. She'll be tossed out her new place and on her arse within a few weeks too.”

Kili takes a step forward. “Don't talk about her like that!”

He doesn't know why he says it. It seems instinctive to want to challenge this woman, rather than defend his mother.

The woman looks at him, only mildly interested. “Oh? And who are you then, lovie?”

“He's my brother,” says Fili, stepping forward himself and putting a hand across Kili's body.

“A brother! Might've known there'd be another one. Spit of his mum, this one, isn't he? Different dads, I suppose?”

Admirably, Kili thinks, Fili still doesn't rise to it. “Come on, Kili,” he mutters. “She's not here.”

“Kili!” the woman snorts. “Kili and Fili! God, your mum was off her head.”

“Shove off, you old witch,” Fili hisses, and he takes hold of Kili's arm and pulls him off back down the corridor.

They leave the building and Fili goes straight to the curb and sits down. Kili stands a bit behind him, wavering.

“Are... you okay?” he asks after a while.

Fili shakes his head, his lips pressed tightly together, but not like he's saying no. Just like he doesn't know what else to do. He doesn't talk for a very long time. It's scary. It's like he goes into a trance. But Fili's supposed to be the one in charge. Finally, more out of a desire to just have Fili speak again than to actually find Dís, Kili suggests they go and ask some of the other neighbours if they have an address.

“She's bound to have told someone before she left.”

“She wouldn't, she hated them all,” says Fili. Then, quickly, “Only because they hated us first.”

“Well, what about... what about...” Kili can't think straight. He's suddenly so tired, like all the nerves and excitement have left him in one great flood, so he can barely stand up straight anymore. All he wants to do is sit down too, even on the dirty pavement, but if he does then maybe neither of them will ever get up again. He steps forward and touches Fili gently on the shoulder. Fili flinches.

“Come on,” says Kili, “come on, we have to go.”

“Go where?”

Kili swallows. “I don't know. Home.”

Fili stands up suddenly and shouts at him, “ _This_ is home!”

“Don't shout at me,” says Kili, voice cracking like a child's.

“Well don't be stupid then! Go home? How can we go anywhere? What do you need to go places, Kili? What is it? Money? Well I don't see any money around here, do you? Do you see any money, Kili?”

He's still shouting; Kili shrinks back away from him but Fili just follows.

“And it's just like you to want to go back there anyway. To just give up. No wonder you let everyone walk all over you all the time, you've no fucking guts at all. Well, go on then. Leave. Just like you did before. Leave your own family.”

“You left too.”

Fili jerks like he's been hit. “I didn't leave,” he says in a low voice, which is somehow scarier than the shouting. “I was taken away.”

“So was I!”

“You!” Fili snaps, jabbing a finger at Kili's chest. “Wanted to go. All it took was a fucking dummy dipped in sugar and you forgot your own mother.”

“I was a baby! You're not being fair.”

“Oh grow _up_ , Kili. You knew what was happening. And you never came back, did you?”

“I'm here now.”

“And look what fucking good that is!” Fili kicks one of the big plastic bins beside the wall and it topples over with a great crash, spilling its black bag guts all over the pavement. Fili falls back down to the curb, clutching his head in his hands.

“Made it up so real,” he murmurs. “Why isn't she here, Kili? Why does she _always_ have to mess everything up?”

Kili doesn't have an answer. This whole day has revolved around a woman he doesn't know, and therefore can't understand her motives. He doesn't know why a mother would let her two sons be taken away, and then disappear herself without a trace. He can think of some possible answers, but Fili wouldn't like them very much.

And, although it's perhaps unnatural, the real answer to that question isn't Kili's priority. His main concern is that they're in the biggest city in England, and they have no money, and it's late and they're lost, and there's nothing they can do about it.


	11. Chapter 11

No, there is something they can do. Kili's first thought is a payphone, but they were already scraping together the last of their change for the train, so that's no good. He's been lost before, in towns and stations, even supermarkets when he was very little. Given that it was Mr Baggins he usually got himself lost from (as Thorin could rarely pluck up the enthusiasm to take a screaming five-year-old anywhere) it was Mr Baggins who gave him the necessary advice: when you're lost, remember that most of the people around you aren't. You just have to pick one of them to ask – the one that looks the most normal.

Those were his words. 'The most normal'. It's easy to find someone normal in Tesco or York railway station, but in a night-time suburb of north London it's a different story. Kili considers the parade of shops opposite the flats, the kebab place and the chippy and the Chinese, the off license on the corner. There's a homeless man outside one of the take-outs, mumbling to himself, and a group of lads kicking a lager can about up the road.

Funnily enough, Mr Baggins also tells him it's wrong to be prejudiced, but Kili can't help the uncomfortable churning in his gut at the sight of this street. How can they have lived here? His mother with her flared dresses and bangles, her orange lips, and Fili with his tie-dye shirts and the tiny beads in his hair, the ones that look like pastina.

Kili looks at Fili now, sitting on the curb with his head in his hands. In the lamplight he's suddenly dull. Young.

“We need to go,” Kili says, in as firm a voice as he can muster. “She isn't here, so we need to go.” No answer. “Fili, we're going _now_.”

He doesn't want to get shoved or shouted at, but he doesn't want to stay here either. He wants to be as far away from here as possible.

Fili doesn't look at him.

“I'm not going anywhere,” he says.

And the words Kili conjures up in his mind are lost as soon as he opens his mouth. “Alright,” he says, unexpectedly, a little croakily. “You stay here if you really want to. I'll go.”

So he does. He turns on his heel, and starts making his way back up the street.

He has no idea where he's going, of course. He passes a chemist and a betting shop and a closed down pub before his head finally catches up with his feet. He's lost. More lost than he's ever been, with no Mr Baggins pushing frantically between crowds calling his name. He has no money, no way of getting home, and no one normal-looking enough to ask for help.

He glances across the road again. The homeless man is still slumped outside the kebab shop, but the boys kicking the can have disappeared. Kili looks straight ahead again, finds the street empty. And long. He stares into the gloom of it, torn between carrying on and running back. 

Then something strikes up behind him, a sound. It's quiet at first, but it soon grows louder; footsteps becoming heavier and faster. Instinct hits like a wave, and Kili manages to move, starts running, the only common compulsion he has left ever since he learned that standing in one spot and wailing does no good.

He isn't fast enough. Hands grab at him, clutch his jacket and yank him back, and Kili cries out, a ridiculous, “ _No_!” as he's spun round.

Fili is holding on to him, panting.

“Why were you running, you idiot?”

“I thought you we were one of those lads,” Kili gasps. “Are you - are you coming with me?”

“Yeah,” Fili says reluctantly. “But only as far as the station, right?”

Kili thinks he means the tube station, or even back to Euston, but they go a different route to the one they first took, and it suddenly dawns on Kili that Fili means a _police_ station.

“Police! I can't get in trouble!”

Even in their dire situation Fili finds it in himself to laugh. They're standing just outside it, obscured only slightly by the hedges. “What do you think you'll get in trouble for? They don't arrest people for running away.”

“Well, doesn't matter,” Kili mutters. “Uncle won't want me back anyway. Not after this.”

“Course he will. He'll be mad as hell and you'll be grounded forever, but he'll be going frantic looking for you right now.” Fili clicks his tongue, cocks his head to the side. “He really does care about you, you know. That's why he nags and shouts all the time. It's 'cos he loves you.”

Kili shrugs, embarrassed. “He loves you too. Probably.”

“Having the same blood as someone doesn't make them love you, Kil.”

“What, like, Mum doesn't really love me?”

Fili doesn't answer for a while. “She loves us both,” he says eventually. “She just can't look after us.”

“Are you still going to try and find her?”

“I don't know. Maybe.”

“Where will you look?”

“I know a few places she might be. Friends' houses and... with family.”

“Family? What family?”

Fili sighs, fiddling with his bag strap, looking anywhere but at Kili. “Just people, alright?”

“But what if she's _not_ with them? What if you get there and the same thing happens as before, it's just empty? Fili, you should...” Kili licks his lips, swallows, considers. “You should just come back home with me.”

Fili looks at him for a long time before speaking, a wry smile tugging at his lips. “Thought you hated me.”

“We're family. You don't hate family.” Kili shrugs. “That's what you told me.”

It's funny, he thinks, and he's never thought of it this way before; that even love between family members can be earned far more easily than hatred.

For a moment Fili looks like he might give in. Then he says, “I can't. I'm sorry, Kili.”

In the end, it doesn't matter anyway whether Fili wants to stay or go. They've been loitering too long. A police officer comes out and claps them both on the shoulder.

 

 

They sit side-by-side in the station, in a little room at the back. Peach walls and stained blue carpet tiles with a heavy locked door in the corner. A lady comes and gives them biscuits and Styrofoam cups of tea. Fili doesn't touch his so Kili scarfs down both of theirs, suddenly ravenous. The woman doesn't seem to mind. She asks them a lot of questions, very s-l-o-w-l-y and calmly, about how they've ended up in “such a knot” as she puts it. Fili rolls his eyes and huffs and explains rather impatiently, more than once, that they aren't stupid or on drugs or homeless, Kili's simply come to London to visit their mother and now they're deciding on the best way for him to get back home.

“And why hasn't your mother sorted out a way for you to get back?” the woman asks, directing the question at Kili. She doesn't say it unkindly, but Fili snaps at her all the same.

“She's been away on holiday. There was a mix-up with the dates and she isn't back yet.”

Kili looks at him, impressed with the lie. It's clear the police officer isn't so convinced.

“So why aren't you going back to York with your brother, Fili?”

“I live here.”

“Here in Camden?”

“Yes.”

“Whereabouts do you live?”

“Makehope House.”

Kili waits for the police officer to raise her eyebrows or sniff in disgust, but she never does.

“Your mum left you all alone in your flat while she went away?”

Fili is utterly indignant at this. “I'm seventeen!”

It's a lie, he's sixteen. But even if the police officer believes him, she still looks concerned. She turns to Kili and puts on another smile.

“Kili, is it? Would you mind stepping outside with me for just a tick?”

Fili speaks before Kili can. “Why?” he demands.

“I just need to ask him a few questions, too. Don't worry, there's nothing to be scared about.”

She makes Fili stay behind and leads Kili off down a corridor outside the room, stops beside a water cooler and leans down so they're eye-to-eye, like some soppy Reception teacher. She's treating him like a child, but his heart's still thudding in terror. He's never been in a police station before. Fili keeps saying they're not in trouble, but Kili knows it isn't true. He's never been in more trouble in his life.

“Who do you live with, Kili?” she asks.

“My uncle.”

“And your brother?”

He ducks his head. “You don't have to talk to me like that, you know. I'm fifteen.” He imagines what Fili might say. “It's so _patronizing_.”

“I'm very sorry. We're just concerned about you.” She tries smiling at him, as if they're friends. “Do you think you might be able to give me a way to contact your uncle?”

He lifts his head, gnawing on his sore lip. How can she ask him to do that? After all their hard work - the watch, the till, poor Mr Baggins. But then he thinks about everything else, the afterwards of the whole situation. His mum isn't here. She could be in London, but she might as well be on the other side of the world. Where are they supposed to go other than home? They've got nowhere else. They're foundlings. 

So he looks at the police officer and in a steady a voice as possible he recites their phone number. It's the only way they'll get home, but he still feels like a traitor.

 

 

The police don't cross county borders, and Thorin hasn't got a car. Dwalin comes for them in the dead hours of morning, Thorin in the passenger seat. He looks haggard, but as soon as he sees Kili he hugs him hard, telling him what a stupid, stupid child he is. Kili's so exhausted he thinks he might cry and then, mortified, he realises his eyes _are_ watering a bit. He hides them by burrowing into Thorin's clothes, barely noticing the fact he's being scolded at the same time.

To Fili, Thorin says nothing. Not in the station, and not in the car on the way home. The journey is agonizing, the long, drawn-out silences only ever broken by Dwalin's tuneless humming or the radio traffic reports. Kili sits rigid with fear in the backseat, dreaming up every scenario possible, the good and bad. Except every time something even remotely hopeful rears its head – say, that Thorin might be so happy to see him he won't want to punish him in the slightest – an uglier, far more likely outcome bubbles to the surface: despite Fili's reassurances, Kili is convinced Thorin is going to get rid of him. Nobody would want to look after such an awful child. Nobody should have to.

But when they get home, Thorin doesn't speak other than to tell Kili to go to bed. The sun starts to rise just as Kili crawls beneath his duvet. He hears Fili come in a few moments later, hears the thud of his clothes and boots against the floor and the creaking springs as he climbs into his own bed. For a while they're both quiet. Kili decides to go first.

“Are you mad at me?” he whispers. “Fili?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Why would I be mad at you?”

“Because you always are. And because I told them the phone number so Uncle could come and get us. And I'm... well, I'm sorry.”

“It's alright. It doesn't matter. She wasn't there anyway, she...” Fili sighs, and Kili hears him turn over in bed. “Just go to sleep.”

But Kili can't sleep. No matter how exhausted he was in London, now his brain is alive and whirring, heart thudding through his pyjamas. He can't shake it. He's home, he's safe, and he still feels frightened.

Proper daylight comes too soon, and Thorin doesn't talk all morning. He doesn't bring it up over lunch, and when Kili goes back to his bedroom Thorin doesn't come in all afternoon. Kili doesn't enjoy arguments with his uncle, but he hates the silences even more. And in the end, quite surprisingly, it's Mr Baggins who breaks this one.

“Bit of a more unwieldy pickle than usual, this one, isn't it?” he says, shovelling compost. Lorna's round for a Big Talk, so Mr Baggins has asked Kili to come and help him down in the shop. It'll be his turn to go up next, once Lorna's finished speaking with Thorin. He hopes they take a very long time.

He shrugs, picking at the loose leaves on the counter. “Dunno.”

Mr Baggins chuckles, no doubt trying to lighten the mood, but when Kili shoots him a look he shuts up. Then he sighs.

“You know, Kili, last night your uncle was absolutely beside himself.”

“I don't really want to talk about it.”

“Well,” says Mr Baggins, “I think we should. If only because you and I both know Thorin isn't very good at talking about his, er. His feelings.”

“I don't think I'm very good at that either...”

“No, nor am I. We're a real sorry bunch, aren't we?” Mr Baggins takes a deep breath and lays his trowel aside carefully. He looks at Kili, gives a sudden grin. “Look at you. You're almost as big as me now. Not that that's difficult.” He bends and lowers his hand to halfway down his leg. “You were _this_ tall when I first met you. Peeking out behind your uncle's leg with this great wild mess of hair. 'I went to collect my nephew, they gave me a water spaniel', those were his words. The... well, the home you'd been in, they tried so hard to cut it short but you refused to let anyone touch it. And Thorin, you know, he pretended to mind but really I think he quite liked that you were so stubborn. Probably reminded him a bit of himself.”

Kili flinches, more at the fondness in Mr Baggins' voice than anything else. The irrepressible kindness, automatic forgiveness, given to him by the man he stole from.

“You're a lot like him, you know,” Mr Baggins goes on.

“No, I'm not,” says Kili.

“Well, you're a bit shorter and much better at planting Mahogany Midgets, but other than that...” He laughs, a small, gentle sound. “We don't have to be the spitting image of our parents, Kili. We're molded by everyone we're close to.”

“So why aren't you like Thorin?”

Mr Baggins seems surprised by this. “Well, maybe I am in some ways. Hey, we're both terrible worry-guts, me and him.” He pokes Kili gently in the arm. “Do you know, the only time I've seen Thorin more scared than last night was the evening he first brought you to live here? He'd been _so_ nervous all month about you arriving. He'd got Bofur to come and decorate your bedroom, and he kept fretting over whether or not you'd like it. Can you imagine that?”

Even Kili can't help but laugh now. “No! Did he really?”

“Oh, he was fretting about bloody everything. And then on that first night, once he'd finally got you quiet and tucked up in bed, he asked me up for a cup of tea, because he said if he didn't have any company he'd go mad from checking on you every five minutes. He was utterly beside himself.” There's a gap, and Mr Baggins purses his lips against a second sigh. “He loves you very, very much even if he isn't the best at showing it all the time. You're the most important person in his life. The most important thing, more important than the shop, the flat.”

It isn't nice to hear. It makes Kili feel worse than ever, and he drops the trowel he was only half-heartedly working with and wraps his arms around his stomach, like that might stem the ache.

“I was going to come back,” he says quietly. “I just wanted to see her first. Just once.” A thought hits him, not for the first time, and he looks at Mr Baggins imploringly. “Are they gonna take me away again?”

“I don't know. I'm sorry, Kili. It isn't anything to do with me.”

“Of course it is! You've been around years, just as long as he has. And I'm...” He gulps and squeezes his eyes shut, tears of something that could be shame and could be fear pricking hotly at his eyes. “I'm sorry I stole from you.”

“It's alright,” Mr Baggins says quietly.

“I'll pay it all back, I promise. I'll work in the shop, I'll –”

“Of course you will.” And gently Mr Baggins lifts up Kili's trowel again and passes it over, pressing it into his hand. “Why do you think I've called you down here, eh?”

He smiles at him, the way he has been smiling at him for over a decade; the enduring grin of the kindest man. Some of the stone in Kili's chest crumbles away. He's been forgiven, now, by two members of his family.


	12. Chapter 12

Kili thinks at first he won’t have any say in what happens to him. He’s convinced he’ll be carted back to the children’s home and locked up until he’s seventeen, and Thorin will only visit on Saturdays.

He used to do that, back before he fostered Kili properly. Every weekend Kili would kneel up on the window seat in the home, nose pressed against the glass, waiting to see his uncle round the corner of the long driveway. Sometimes they’d spend the whole weekend together. Those were the best days. Thorin would let Kili stay up way past his bed time, eat and drink all the things he wasn’t allowed at the home, biscuits and Coco Pops and sugary blue popcorn when they went to the town fair. Sitting at the kitchen table they’d play paper games together or do jigsaws, and at night Thorin would tuck him up on the sofa, because back then the second bedroom was just a chaotic office.

Thorin would bring little presents on visiting days too, sweets or comics or tiny wind-up toys. He told Kili – years after – that he always wanted to bring _better_ gifts, better clothes than the rags the home dressed him in, but that the staff advised against it. Said the other kids might get jealous. Said they might steal from Kili.

Which they did anyway, unless Kili managed to hide the toys away in the little wooden box at the back of his wardrobe. Sometimes he wouldn’t even eat the sweets. He’d keep a couple of them under his pillow, and take them out at night. The lollies he liked best because they smelt the strongest, and when he was in bed he’d run his fingers along the crinkly wrappers and breathe in the sweet, fruity scents. He knew even then that it was weird, that people would laugh if they knew, but he didn’t have a teddy bear or a special blanket like a lot of the other children. The sweets were a present from his uncle, and Kili wanted to keep them.

He’s certain that Thorin won’t want to keep _him_ anymore. Not after he’s been so terrible, has put himself in so much disgrace. But Lorna visits on Thursday, and again for an hour on Friday, and then on Saturday morning she asks Kili where he’d like to live, and he says, “Here,” and nobody tells him that he can’t.

“Although,” says Lorna, “we’ll have to make a few wee changes, won’t we, chickie?”

Kili isn’t sure what sorts of changes she means at first, but when she asks Thorin to come in – they’re talking at the breakfast table in the kitchen – she starts suggesting all kinds of lovely things: day trips, game nights, _holidays_.

Kili lights up at the idea of a holiday, but Thorin rolls his eyes. It’s pretty obvious a weekend break at Center Parcs isn’t high on his list of priorities.

“You could try doing the big weekly shop together, or maybe you could go to the jewellery shop sometimes, Kili. At weekends?” Lorna suggests, tapping her long nails against her stripy coffee cup. “And you like archery, don’t you? How about you both practice together? Show your uncle how it’s done, eh?”

Kili isn’t sure about this. He looks at Thorin, and Thorin looks at him, and they both raise their eyebrows.

“Or,” she goes on hastily, “how about having a go on the range at the youth centre? It’s practically brand new! Perhaps you could go along after school.”

Thorin regretfully begins to explain, “Kili used to have lessons but we –”

“It doesn’t cost a penny. It’s one of the town’s key charity-funded youth provision facilities,” Lorna jumps in, reciting the phrase boldly as if she’s been learning it off by heart. “It’s for older children and teenagers who… well, it’s to give you all a bit of fun on a Saturday!”

She means it’s for underprivileged kids.

“Now the archery range isn’t very _big_ , but you’d meet lots of other people there, wouldn’t you? And they do other sports too. Cycling, climbing – what do you think, Kili? Fancy yourself as an Olympic cyclist?”

He doesn’t, but he loves the idea of a free archery range. When he looks at his uncle again, Thorin gives him a little smile. Lorna is so pleased that she tries to high-five Kili when she leaves.

“We will, you know,” says Thorin, when she’s gone. “We’ll do more together. I promise.”

“I know you’re busy,” says Kili, shrugging. “You have the shop.”

“That’s no excuse. Look, you can come to the shop _with_ me, like Lorna said. Or we can… ah, what was it? Food shopping? There, we’ll do the weekly shopping together, yes?”

They look at each other, and Kili purses his lips. For the first time in what seems like weeks, Thorin actually laughs. He flops down on to the sofa and indicates for Kili to sit beside him.

“Or I’ll stop bringing work home with me and you stop holing up in your bedroom and we’ll start having proper conversations instead, how’s that?”

Kili nods. “That’s good.”

He’s glad Thorin doesn’t seem to be angry at him anymore, but he still can’t stop the niggling feeling that this is all a cover-up for something bigger; something worse. Not anger but disappointment, perhaps. Sadness.

It’s made worse when the smile thins on Thorin’s lips and he looks at Kili – looks at him _properly_ – and says, quietly, “You _do_ want to live here, don’t you?”

A lump forms in Kili’s throat. “Don’t you want me to?”

Thorin sighs. “I want you to be happy. Just happy. That’s the most important thing. I don’t want you to choose to stay here because you think you have to. Because your mother…” His voice, barely perceptibly, cracks. “Because she wasn’t there, in London, this isn’t… the default option.”

“I wasn’t going to stay in London,” Kili blurts out, pulling his long sleeves over his hands. “I wasn’t even sure she’d be there, not really. I just wanted to see what it was like. What she might be like. But I wasn’t going to stay, honestly, Uncle, I really wasn’t.”

“Alright, it’s alright.”

“And I’m _really_ sorry.”

Thorin puts an arm around him, tugs him close. He gently pulls Kili’s hands out from his sleeves, rolling them up for him. It’s an odd gesture, something he used to do when Kili was very small.

“I know you are,” he says quietly. “Even if it wasn’t possible for you to live with her, maybe I should’ve…” He sighs again. “I don’t know, been more open with you? More open with her, even. I suppose I wanted to protect you. Keep you here, keep you safe.”

“Do you… know where she is?” Kili asks tentatively, quickly adding, “I won’t try to find her. I just want to know if you know where she is.”

Thorin shakes his head, looking down at the floor, at the whorls in the carpet. “London, still. There’s a record kept, but by the time it gets to me she’s usually already moved on again. She’s like that. Like a bird. Always flying south.”

“Does she know where we are?”

“I imagine so.”

“That was a stupid question, wasn’t it? She used to send presents.” Kili plucks at his baggy red jumper. It really is too big for him. “I wouldn’t mind writing to her, if they have her new address. But I know she probably won’t want me to. And it’s fine. I wouldn’t mind, though.”

“I can speak to Lorna about it.”

Kili nods. “Alright,” he says, but he means it. It really would be fine if he wasn’t allowed to write to her new address, and it would be fine if he did but she never wrote back. It would even be fine if he found out, somehow, that she didn’t love him. He isn’t even sure if he loves her, which seems an evil thing to say about his own mother, but he doesn’t know her. He’s always known Thorin, and Thorin has always loved him. Thorin, who used to bring lollies and comics to the children’s home, new vests and socks for Kili to wear beneath his clothes. He bought him ice cream at Filey Bay Beach.

In a split second Kili gently collapses against him, rests his head on his uncle’s arm, like a dog. He wants to say that he broke the watch, but he can’t bear it. He can’t be trusted with the smallest thing.

He’ll have to tell him. Eventually, he’ll have to. But it would be wrong to add to their problems so soon, regardless. There are other things on Thorin’s mind, Kili, Dís, the shop, the flat. Kili’s brother, in the room next door.

 

 

Fili is sitting cross-legged on his bed. He has his head down, his hair – untied, thick – hanging around his face. He’s scribbling in his book.

He hasn’t packed up his things. There have been talks, loud and terrible things, and shouting, with a man far scarier than Lorna, who sat grim-faced at the kitchen table with black tea on Friday, who wouldn’t let Kili in the room while he spoke to his brother.

They’re letting Fili stay, somehow. Age, Fili says. He’s too old for them to care, he says. Almost seventeen, he’ll be out of school soon. Free to roam, and then – where? London, perhaps? Kili’s fingers curl at the idea.

He sits on the edge of his bed and then, cautiously, crosses over to sit on the end of Fili’s.

There’s silence for a moment, save the scratch of Fili’s pencil. Without looking up he grunts, “She gone?”

Kili nods.

“I don’t know how you stand her,” Fili says.

“She’s alright.” He pauses, eyes fixed on Fili's deep red blanket, the one he brought with him when he first arrived. “She tried to high five me.”

Fili snorts. “So what’s she making you do?”

“Go to a youth club for poor kids. You?”

“Saturday job,” says Fili, and somehow, they smile at each other.

“I’m glad you’re allowed to stay,” Kili says finally.

“Don’t be so soft,” says Fili, but there’s still that smile behind the gruffness. “Anyway, it’s not without its penalties. I have to save up to pay poor old Bilbo back, and starting Monday they’re going to make sure I go to that bloody school.”

“I wish we didn’t have to go.” Kili’s fingers curl anxiously into fists beneath his sleeves at the thought of Monday morning. “I hate it.”

“I know, but it’s not for much longer,” Fili says, surprisingly reasonably. “Anyway, if anyone gives you a hard time I’ll kick their head in, alright?”

Kili perks up at this. “Really?”

“I’ve missed out on a lifetime of using my little brother as an excuse to start fights. Might as well make the most of the next few months.” He’s smiling, but it fades quickly, and he glances back down at his lap. “You know, Kili, I didn’t mean what I said… outside the house, when we went to London? About you having no guts? I didn’t mean that.”

Kili shrugs, embarrassed.

“You put up with things,” Fili elaborates. “I don’t mean that in a bad way. You endure things. Not like Mum. And not like…” He huffs out a snigger. “Well, not like me.”

“Does that mean you’re gonna go? Try and find her again?” asks Kili, startled by the lump that forms in his throat as he says it.

“I can’t, can I? No bloody money. Looks like I’m stuck here with you for the time being.” But if that isn’t really the entire reason that he’ll stay, at least for a while longer, Fili doesn’t say so.

The day is bright and chilly, and when Kili stands up to feed Blue, he looks out of the window at the street, calm and quiet, and Mr Baggins on the pavement below, bustling boxes of peace lilies into the shop.

“It’s too hot in here,” Kili says suddenly, turning around, “and boring. D’you want to go to the park?”

“The park?”

“Buckland Park, it isn’t far.”

Fili considers this, before setting his tatty book aside. “Is there anything to do there?” he asks, but he’s already reaching for his jacket.

Thorin stops them as they make their way out of the bedroom. Kili tries to explain, but Thorin isn’t happy about it.

“Not you,” he says to Fili, but warmly. “Not just now.”

Fili opens his mouth to argue, but seems to change his mind. Just shrugs and nods, incredibly, and leans back against the door frame of their bedroom.

“You go,” he says when Kili hesitates. “I’ll see you in a bit.”

Kili puts his coat on over his red jumper, pulls his shoes on by the door. Outside, the day nips gently at him, put if he puts his bare fingers in his pockets, the air seems far less cold.

It’s quiet out, too, and as Kili approaches the park, makes his way up the long, wide path, he hears only the muted rumble of far-off traffic, the slow crunch of gravel beneath his feet and, the further into the park he gets, the occasional, sporadic burst of birdsong. He finds his way using the band stand, its dome glittering in the weak and budding sun. He goes as far as the edge of the lake and stops. When he dips his foot, water laps gently at the toe of his shoe. The ice has begun to melt.

Kili breathes in, and exhales.

 

End


End file.
